OVERVIEW
DECKSTORM is a Collectable Card Game (CCG) for Mobile platforms include Android and iOS.
Each player collects and sellects 15 cards for each deck and fight against other players on-line.
Similar to the real CCG board games, it has deep strategic aspects such as Class, Affinity, and Skill.
PROBLEM
A single battle in the real card games takes average 15-30 min, sometimes even longer.
For mobile gaming experience making the battle duration shorter was crucial to provide a convenient play duration on the go.
ROLE AS ART DIRECTOR AND LEAD UI/UX DESIGNER
• Art Direction: World setup, Card Art, Environment Art, In-game Items and Marketing Graphics, UI Graphic
• Competitor Research
• User Research, User Testing & Interviews
• Wireframes, High-fi mockups, Unity integration
• Tools Used: Unity, Illustrator, Photoshop, Proto.io, JIRA, Basecamp, Shotgun
COMPETITORS
• Most competitors has the classic mana system therefore a single battle tends to get longer than our game
• Look & Feel is outdated as in a conventional classic fantasy look. i.e. Stone Tablets, Gold ornamentations
CHALLENGES
From our past game design experiences in DeNA, we identified 10-15 min play time is the average time that players can keep playing on the go everyday.
In order to make a single battle duration into 10-15 min, we've put our efforts to simplify the game play.
On the other hand the core of CCG experience is the deep strategic aspects so that we introduced 2 key features
that keep the deep strategic aspects in the simplified way and facilitate the speed of the game play.
Skill Points
Instead of using traditional Mana system we created the Skill Points that user can speed up the skill activation by allocating 15 points within a deck.
The skill points enable fast-pace skill activation that gives user to attack an enemy with skills even from the first turn.
Mulligan
Each player can choose 5 cards to bring into each turn from their hand (15 cards randomly shuffled) that increase the chance to pick the best cards from the first turn.
“Great game. Absolutely the best card based game I’ve ever played!
Easy to pick up and the deck customization is very deep which is fantastic.”
USER RETENTION
In order to maintain user retention, we constantly add new contents where players can gain items to reinforce their cards.
• New Quest Puzzles: Unique quests that offer special rewards.
• Special Campaign: Each special stages offer in-game items and currency
• New Card Pack: New cards with new skill and strength
VISUAL DESIGN
A modern twist on retro-inspired art, graphical ornamentation and line-work
ART DIRECTION
One of the card arts that I art directed for, We add 3 new cards every week with stories behind
WIREFRAMES
The notification icon in the home screen is one of the most important feature to retain users for coming back to our game.
The icons show new contents and rewards that the players can play and obtain.
This is one of the wireframes to show how a notification icon takes user to a specific screen.
The challenge was how we show a multiple type of notifications ( 3 different types of the quest notification ) in the most consolidated way,
rather than showing all of the each notification icon as 3 different notifications.
ICONOGRAPHY
The studies for the iconography on the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, all the icons are designed by incorporating either square or diamond shapes to get a consistency across the game
UI STYLE GUIDELINE
The selected minimal UI components reduce the app size and enable us to create generic type of UI screens without building it from scratch
VIDEOS
MARKETING GRAPHICS
We had been supporting the internal marketing team to raise the quality bar of the marketing graphics
CONCLUSION
• The user retention became the best result even from the first month after the release among past DeNA's projects. (Under NDA I'm not allowed to talk about number, Sorry!)
• The short game play was widely appreciated among the players and it was proved in the retention rate and average session time.
• The modern Art Deco style helped to let our product stand out from other competitors and lowered the cost for user acquisition less than half compare to the last project.