294: Designing UX for Games (feat. Tea Chang) (& Endgame Discussion)

This week, we welcome Tea Chang, a UX Designer working on League of Legends at Riot Games, to talk about designing user experiences for gamers. At the end of the show, Tea sticks around for a long, spoiler-filled discussion of Avengers: Endgame. In Follow-up, we read and respond to your feedback regarding the cover art concept from last week. And as always, we share a few cool things, like a video series about movies, some state-specific branding, and a little indie film about superheroes. Spoilers spoilers spoilers. Spoilers.

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Follow-up:

Last week, we tweeted out a first draft of the new cover art
Video: "The Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup"
Brett Yanoski likes the mask idea but thinks the execution needs work
Ryan Morrison and Luca Orio gave us their seals of approval
Alex Binder likes the graphic Ds
Chrish Dunne would prefer a better logotype and more abstract Ds
Follow us on Twitter and stay tuned for more versions of the cover art
Mskellybrooks left us a very nice iTunes review
You can leave one for us, too :)

Interview:

Check out Tea Chang on Twitter and at her personal site
League of Legends is a wildly popular multiplayer online battle arena game from Riot Games
Video: "Playtesting - How to Get Good Feedback on Your Game - Extra Credits"
Literally unplayable is "an expression—often sarcastic—indicating that a video game is so badly broken that it prevents a player from progressing or enjoying the experience"
Vivi Rosenstein's stance on assigning blame for suboptimal design has matured over the years
Banner blindness is "a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information"
Article: "Get ready to see more ads on Google’s traffic app Waze"
Adobe XD is "the fastest way to design, prototype, and share any user experience"
Video: "The Magic of Making Sound" is a great peek into foley, an art which, when done well, goes unnoticed
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild forces you to use a wide range of weapons by making them both easy to find and quick to break
Video game design is "the process of designing the content and rules of a video game in the pre-production stage"
Article: "'Mortal Kombat 11' Requires More Than $6,000 to 100%, According to Early Estimates"
We talked about the interface and game design of Apex Legends on episode 283: Deadly American Idol
In the gorgeous game Gris, "light puzzles, platforming sequences, and optional skill-based challenges reveal themselves as more of Gris’s world becomes accessible"
Video: "Portal 2 Intro", in which a tutorial is hidden behind a funny, story-driven calibration test

One Cool Thing:

Brian shared Patrick H. Willems, a YouTuber who makes videos about movies
Check out the Patrick Explains series, especially the one about The Fast and the Furious
Gabriel Valdivia introduced Brian to the channel
Tea shared the team page for Mayor Pete Buttigieg, which has some really nice branding for each US state
Shepard Fairey is famous for his Obama Hope poster (and the Obey clothing brand)
Marshall shared Avengers: Endgame and discussed it with Tea and Brian in a segment called...

Endgame Discussion:

!!! SPOILERS !!!

Video: "Every Avengers: Endgame Easter Egg", in which 209 easter eggs are enumerated
Video: "Rocky Training" is the prototypical montage sequence showing a protagonist's improvement over time
The Dark Night of the Soul is "a moment, usually at the end of the second act of a three-act story, where all seems lost and the protagonist must confront 'a collapse of perceived meaning'"
r/inthesoulstone

!!! SPOILERS !!!

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Marshall is @marshallbock
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