Things talked about in this episode:
- 01:10 Sophia Prater
- 02:15 Axure
- 09:14 Object-Oriented UX (OOUX)
- 13:17 Atomic Design
- 14:52 Thinking in Services
- 16:31 UX Magic
- 19:14 Object Map
- 27:05 Lords of Waterdeep
- 29:28 OOUX.com
- 34:03 Moonlighter
- 38:10 Cult of the Lamb
- 38:48 Rollercoaster Tycoon
- 39:38 Monster Hunter
Introductory Guy
Welcome to design thinking games, a gaming and User Experience podcast card carrying UXers Tim Broadwater and Michael Scofield examine the player experience of board games, pen and paper role playing games, live action games and video games. Play through the backlog on your pod catcher of choice and on the web, at designthinkinggames.com.
Tim Broadwater
Design thinking is a process that is used to understand users challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions. In this podcast, we apply design thinking to gaming. So for anyone who doesn’t know you, can you introduce yourself and give us like the elevator pitch of Sophia Prater?
Sophia Prater
Yeah, sure. Hi, I’m Sophia Prater. And I consider myself the chief evangelist for something I call Object-Oriented UX. I teach OOUX at companies, I go in and do workshops. Recently, I’ve done workshops for Microsoft and Adobe, did a talk with Google. And so big brands, also small agencies. So I do a lot of teaching Object-Oriented UX. I have a masterclass and a certification. So a lot of my focus is teaching this 10 week Object-Oriented UX course. And so I teach a lot, I’ve somehow turned from a designer into a teacher, I’m actually getting kind of back into design. Now I was, you started my career in consulting, worked, I started my career at Accenture and then went to other smaller consulting companies, the only place I was ever internal was at CNN.com. And so that was back in 2011 2012. And that’s kind of where everything started with Object-Oriented UX, when responsive design came onto the scene, and I was at CNN and I got put into the role. Funny enough for my, my very good Axure skills got put into there because I was really fast at prototyping. And I got put into the position of doing the, the 2012 election results. And so this was around June of 2012. And we kind of woke up and we’re like, oh, we need to design what’s going to happen in November on CNN.com. And the powers that be at CNN decided that this was going to be responsive experience, it would be the first responsive experience that CNN had done ever. So it was incredibly short timeline, I think I had like, four days to get first wireframes and, and this is really kind of where all of this thinking started, where I really started thinking modularly I started thinking about repeatable reusable elements, and kind of how to create a simple system. A simple and elegant system of reusable parts, the adage of the more moving parts, the more likely it is to break my engineering grandfather’s voice was like echoing in my head and I was just thinking oh my gosh, I do not want this thing to break. It’s so high profile, you know, the millions and hundreds of millions of people would see that design. So I really kind of got I really prioritized prioritization during that project. And it was a success. It worked really well it got me on the speaking circuit. So I started having to then teach what happened which was interesting in its own right to have to go through something have it have it be a success and then have to talk about it and give a case study on it then it makes you analyze and makes you think what what went right and what went wrong in a really intentional way. And so I started really kind of developing the process from there through having to teach it at conferences and workshops and you know, just kind of one thing led to another and 10 years later my entire career is is basically built around Object-Oriented UX, teaching it sharing it and practicing it with my clients.
Tim Broadwater
Awesome. How is um, what would you describe or what would you say was really that first step that is like this is OOUX this is kind of the package?
Sophia Prater
Yeah, I think that like the things that stuff I can like put my finger on like when things really started to click. I wasn’t calling an Object-Oriented UX start calling it Object-Oriented UX until like, 2015 ish. But back in 2012, when I was working on the election results, one I realized that well, one I was tasked by my product manager to first design The State detail page. So they had already organized all their sprints, page by page, they looked at the 2008 design, they broke up the sprint based on page. So the state detail page like California, Georgia, Ohio, where you would see the state level results, that was what the first sprint was going to be. And they were like, Okay, we only have four days, we only need one design. We only need one screen, of course, we need like mobile and tablet and desktop screens. But all we need is a state detail page. So it’s really not, we’re not asking that much of you. And I realized I was trying to design a cog in the machine without understanding the machine. And how dangerous that was. And I realized, like, Shit, this is not the best way to work. I could get away with this before responsive design kind of designing like myopically. But with responsive design, I really want to create that library apart. So I had to think about the whole frickin system to do that. And that’s when things really started to click for me. And I started thinking about what are the concepts within the elections. And I also realized, like, I’m not designing anything, I am not designing the information architecture for how our government works. Like, I just need to discover it and reflect it. And the as truthfully as possible.
Tim Broadwater
Not going back too much like in time. But if I’m looking at little Sophia Prater, and then how she decided she wanted to do UX or was doing it and then it happened to be UX. I mean, how did you even get your first foot and you actually knew that it was something you wanted to do?
Sophia Prater
I’m so glad you asked me that. Because this is the this is a UX and games podcast. So I mean, when I look back on, we can go we can go far back. When I look back on like what I was, like my play when I was a kid, I was designing games, I was designing little maps I was designing, I would make these like floor plans, sometimes that make up the floor of like my dream house floor plan. But often I would make like theme parks, or I would make like a playground or something like that, or a summer camp, I would like design my favorite little summer camp. And it would be on my dream summer camp. And it would have like all the different areas and I would have like little people going around. So I would design these environments. I would also like take the card games that I already had. And I would remix them and remix parts to create games for my friends to play. So like a lot of the play that I like friend me and my friends would play my friends and I would play with were games that I designed. And then so I ended up in industrial design, because that was like kind of the way I didn’t know if I was going to be doing gaming, I wasn’t really into video games, it was more like physical games, board, board games and card games really liked card games. But yeah, so I decided to go into industrial design because that seemed like the closest fit to use my creativity in a way that was like that was using my head, I don’t want this to come out wrong using my like problem solving skills to get because art is just for you, right? And then but if you’re creating something for something else for somebody else within constraints, that engages more that problem solving part of my brain, so industrial design seemed like a good fit. And then I graduated in 2008 when nobody could get a job and definitely not industrial design. Had to like move into my parents basement the whole nine yards, but ended up getting a very early UX design job. It was actually I was actually my title was UE Analyst because we weren’t calling it UX yet.
Michael Schofield
I remember those. Yeah, that’s interesting.
Tim Broadwater
So I like probably a lot of people got my first exposure to OOUX from like, A List Apart, then and now it’s so like you said there’s classes now and there’s, and it’s just grown so much to this day. And I’m sure you’ve given this pitch like many times but for someone who has no understanding or of what OOUX is, what is the the sentence or the elevator pitch or for dummies version?
Sophia Prater
Yeah, it’s just it’s just object you’re in UX is basically a philosophy that respects the fact that people think in objects, that when you go into an environment that you’ve never been in your what your visual cortex is doing, whether you have a visual impairment or not, your visual cortex is still lighting up. And it’s trying to identify the things in that environment. And it’s trying to identify the relationships between those things through Gestalt and overlapping and proximity, it’s using all those tools to help you navigate that environment by first saying okay, what are the things in this environment? What What how do they sit together in context? What are my relationships are those things what can I do to those things? What things are mine what things are other people’s, what things are dangerous, what things are edible? It just basically goes back to our brain evolving in the physical world. And we still have those same brains that evolved for a very long time in the physical world. But what happens is we go into these digital worlds, and we design digital world worlds, these digital worlds are not beholden to the laws of physics. So often objects change shape arbitrarily, to objects that are completely different might look exactly the same. Because if the UX designer is not being very, very intentional about making sure that we are breaking the laws of physics, in the right way, so we want to break the laws of physics that turn our users into superheroes, right? That makes them like be in two places at once. And like do on like, undo like, oh my gosh, undo amazing breaking the laws of physics, how many times do you like drop a glass and you’re like, where’s my <control> + <z>, you know, want to bring that into the real world. But what we do is we break laws of physics in ways that confuse people and make things harder. And we just really want to respect certain laws of physics, to, to make sure people don’t get confused, and then break laws of physics in the right way. And that’s really what OOUX is about. It’s a set of laws and methodologies to make sure that we are being strategic and how we break those laws of physics in the digital world.
Michael Schofield
I remember the kind of zeitgeist that like, you know, Object-Oriented UX came up in this kind of, like, early. So I guess it’s not like, it’s not early in the scheme of things. But I remember like responsive design, like, when that was like the, the keynote topic of just about every conference, like 2011 2012 2013. And around this time, like Object-Oriented UX to the, to your point about like, developing, like this responsive feature for CNN, it really felt like a time where the, the art direction or the the look and feel aspect of like a design or whatever, like suddenly had to become, like metadata rich. And that’s how I always took like the object of like, OOUX, and there’s where you have something like a carousel, the bane of all existence. But there is like a, like a series of properties and interactions that kind of, like define that, that are, that are bullet points and a word doc in a way or, you know, columns of a spreadsheet, or rows in the database. thing here. I’m just saying, like, I just I remember that like, really transformational like time, where we all started going from what can we do on the web in terms of like powers of CSS? And and like, what can be designed to slowly gravitating toward what ended up what’s now like componentization, and design systems, like thinking of really tiny chunks of design pieces that get puzzled together? And there’s just more intention in architecture? Involved in the work of design and the work of user experience, provision that really kind of got its start back in this time, you know, where you kind of relaunched OOUX and all that.
Sophia Prater
Right. Well, yeah, I mean, there was like, I mean, Brad Frost and Atomic Design. And we really started thinking about like the this the big kind of the very beginning of pattern libraries and design systems, we really started thinking more modularly and my various first OOUX workshop, I wasn’t using that term yet. I was I called it responsive redesign in a day. And I or, and I was calling it modular design, because what I thought I was doing, and then I, the more I learned about what Brad Frost was doing, I was like, this is frickin awesome, but this is not what I’m doing. This is what I’m, that’s very at the UI level, you know that when we think about, okay, how can we like put these components together and make reusable components? I’m thinking about reusable concepts, and what are those concepts? What are those components representing? What is in the carousel, right? Like we can have the best carousel in the whole world. You know, as much as carousel has a bad rap, but like, are the best I always give the example like the best calendar picker in the whole world. But nobody’s coming to your site for carousels and calendar pickers are they’re not even coming to the site for bullet points. Like what are they actually coming for? Are they coming for tutorials? Are they coming for games? Are they coming for video explainers? Are they coming from the on the game theme? Right? Like, are they coming for game designers? Like what are the things that they’re actually coming for? And how do those things work together? And then we can think about all those components that represent those things.
Michael Schofield
It’s super interesting, like, because this is this is where I get wonky too. There are some people out there who like some early work that’s really hard to parse. It’s it’s maybe too academic, but like Majid Iqbal’s Thinking in Services where the like, like, I love his idea. I don’t know how practical it is, but the idea that you could componentize the content or concept object to a point where you could have a bunch of little concepts and then puzzle together a full fledged product from it without knowing what the end user product is.
Sophia Prater
I mean, that’s, that is very similar to what we do is where I mean, usually it’s going to, we’re going to start off with some kind of goal, like, definitely, we want to know what what what outcome is the user looking for? What is the business trying to do? And then it’s going into like, breaking it down to like, what are the concepts that make that up? Before going into? What are people going to be doing to those concepts, we often start with the verbs without thinking about the nouns. So this is all about like, Okay, let’s get really clear on what those nouns are. And then we can say, okay, and now now that we know what the nouns are, now, let’s think about what people want to do to those things in this particular context. And then we can kind of iterate back and forth on that. I think, with our industry, we’re just we really, don’t we think about the net, we think about the verbs, we think about the adjectives, the nouns, we think about the end user. Yeah, we do. But like the actual concepts that are in the system, there is not a good rigorous process for that. Except for I guess what I’m teaching, I haven’t seen a very, very rigorous process for how how do you define the nouns? And how do you figure out how the nouns and verbs click together into a system? What like, how do you I mean, I guess, the other person that’s working on this all shout out to Daniel Rosenberg of UX Magic, his book is great. And he talks about UX grammar, which is very similar, and a lot of content strategists are doing this too. But they’re doing it in the content strategy space, not as much in the product design space. So
Tim Broadwater
I would agree with you. Yeah, I feel like I’ve used OOUX. For nonprofits. I’ve used it for corporate ecommerce, I even helped a school counselor who came to me years ago, and they’re like, I have this thing that I do. And I just don’t know how to make it into an app or web interface. But I need to associate a kid with a classroom, and then they have parents, and then they have an assessment. And then you need to be able to look at filter information in so many ways. And this is the content. And this is the metadata. And this is the interaction that I need to make. And, and I’m like, there’s actually like a formula for success here. It’s called OOUX and we can literally follow it. And it’s, it’s easy for people, I think, to understand once they kind of can wrap their head around it.
Michael Schofield
So so how did like this, like this kind of
Tim Broadwater
How did OOUX become the game, right?
Michael Schofield
Like, how did this conceptual this teaching of like a conceptual framework for product design or in like, underscore design? Become a game? When did you start gamifying?
Sophia Prater
Yeah, I mean, I think I started gamifying it from day one, basically, like when I first started, like my very first workshop at UX strategy, UX Strat conference in Boulder, and then I did a UX Week, right after that, that was in 2014, the responsive redesign in a day. And we were doing a very kind of like preliminary form of object mapping, which is color coded sticky notes. So we already had the color coding in there. And it was kind of like a crossword puzzle. So you know how now we have the columns in the object map. So I might need to like verbally describe an object map. But basically, you have all these columns that show for every object, you have a column, and then you have all the metadata and the core content. And then you’re also showing the nested objects, you’re showing those relationships between all the different columns or objects. It’s just a really powerful artifact and powerful diagram to kind of give you this X ray vision. But the very first version of that was done as a kind of a crossword puzzle. So you started with one object, and then once you’ve hit a piece of an attribute that was actually another object, then you would branch off. And then when you would hit another, another nested object, another attribute that was another object. So for example, I always use the example of like events. So let’s say I’m mapping out the event. And I have the title of the event, the place, the location, the the time of the event, the description of the event, and then I have people going to the event. And I’m like, oh, person is an object so that I would go off to the right, I would sort of say first name, last name, user name, date, whatever interests tags or something like that. So it was already like in the very beginning, object mapping was this very kind of collaborative game like thing kind of thinking about a crossword puzzle and then I kind of it You know, that didn’t make too much sense, because then you would hit young people, you’d hit the events that this person is going to, and you draw an arrow back up, and it just kind of was a mess. So it just kind of got cleaned up throughout the years, as constantly iterating on it. OOUX and, and the processes and all of the methodologies that I teach her on OOUX is very playful. It’s just, it’s really, it’s just a hell of a lot of fun. And that’s the feedback that I get is that I mean, I’ve heard people say that like this is made UX fun for them again, because not only does it like, take a lot of the headaches away, because this is a tool for understanding at the end of the day. And so often, we’re told to design without understanding, and that’s really frustrating for the type of people that go into UX. We like to understand stuff. And then we’re constantly being thrown into situations where we just have to design without understanding it. This is like the first five years of my career which made which would send me home crying on a daily basis. And I was so frustrated that in my mind, and so I mean, not only does it help bring a lot of those headaches, you know, eliminate a lot of those headaches and help with collaboration to help expose that complexity to your stakeholders and to your business, who, you know, sometimes they don’t get how complicated something is, like, just give me some screens by Friday, or how interconnected things are actually. So it helps bring that forward, it helps bring the business and the developers together in a way, that it’s just really fun and playful. And so when and then I just I don’t know how I decided to like make it into a car game. I think it was just like, one night. Yeah, I think I was just I just got inspired. And who knows where ideas come from. And I just, I prototyped it on some index cards, some colored, I had those, I had index cards, and I prototyped it and I kind of like, you know, play tested. And I was like, wow, I’m kind of onto something here. And I made it way too complicated to begin with. And it was really a matter of play testing with so many people and simplifying and taking things out and taking things out and taking things out to make it to make it what it is now. But yeah, I spent about two years play testing it with lots of and iterating on it before actually launching it. And I’ve since taken it off the market, but we are relaunching it later this year.
Tim Broadwater
Yeah, I just naturally assume that it’s like, oh, this, you’re teaching so many workshops, and you’re doing so many sessions that this came out of like, this is something that I need to have for workshops, I had no idea that it is it actually came out from well, now that you spoke a little bit about how you like to design amusement parks and like games. And then this is kind of a great marriage of this understanding system as well as it is a game how would you one of the things about our podcast is, you know, we, we tried to focus on the player experience of like a game. And if you had to describe to people like a player who’s never kind of sat down to play this game? What’s it kind of like for them?
Sophia Prater
What is the player experience? So player experience is basically what you do is you start with your objects, and you get a smattering of objects to pick from, and you start off with a a person, a person, a content type and a thing. And you basically put pull these three objects together. So I think when you play tested, you had teachers create complaints about animals, right. So like, there’s like, a bunch of different funny words, and it kind of creates this sense of people create something about something. So it kind of creates a little bit of a story and a little bit of a system. So you decide which what your objects are. And then you have another smattering of cards, which I call the whiteboard, where you’re basically picking attributes out of that. So you take turns picking attributes to fill out and to make structure around your objects. So you might for for animals, you might put popularity on there, or for complaint, you might put date and time on there or for the person, you might grab a picture for a profile picture for the teacher. And so you start to kind of build out that structure, kind of where it gets really interesting is there’s also these crosslinking cards, so you start building connections between them, you want to get the card that lets you say that a teacher has many complaints that they’ve created about the animals and that an animal has many complaints created about it, that a complaint has one teacher that created it and a complaint has one or maybe many animals that it’s about. So that’s just one kind of silly example, I love that example but and then you basically have to pitch it. There’s other parts where you hire team members. So you actually to be able to, to be able to draw attributes. You need to hire information architects, you need to hire content strategists, you need to hire UX designers. it’d be able to draw the green cards, which are your interactions and you say, Okay, I’m going to have a, I’m going to add a like interaction to the complaint, or I’m going to add a follow interaction to the teacher. And you basically build a system and then add a point. And then the point system works in a way that it basically leads you toward a better design, the more points that you get, the better your design is. But there’s a lot of storytelling in there too. So as you select these attributes, you kind of have to have to validate it and say, Why are you putting this attribute there. And then hopefully, at the end, you can pitch a pretty fun, fun, and maybe even, maybe even viable product that you might decide you want to go with create.
Michael Schofield
That’s one thing that I thought was really quite interesting was, yeah, at some point this, this with a goal to create enough or to create the highest, to create the highest score to get the highest score, the quality of like, the product actually improves.
Sophia Prater
That’s the intention.
Tim Broadwater
You’re creating a quality product that is, you know, and then the team that you’re building has, is essential to help move the product around or, or to be able to work on those certain parts. And then kind of the end is, you know, apart from all these pieces, and at some point, you’re done, and then it’s a total end game, kind of like I would say, you know, Lords of Waterdeep, or Ticket to Ride and so in the end, the most effective user interface or product or you build or what have you, you actually have a rank and a score, and then the high score wins.
Sophia Prater
Yeah, exactly.
Michael Schofield
My favorite part was, I think, probably the entire, like the startup poaching or entrepreneurial, like meta game where you know, you can poach your opponents, you can put your opponent’s like best actors, you can power up your like UX folks with coffee. Like there’s a there’s a lot there. That’s like really fun that you know, you can like, you know, I think probably by by dint of it, like kind of like emerging from countless hours like workshopping this object map, and just, it feels really legit to working in UX professionally. And that’s one of the things that’s not always true. It’s like when you’re playing like Lords of Waterdeep yeah, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re you’re not that analogous to, you know, like, to, like a prince in Faerûn or something like that. But this feels like a lot of the work that you end up actually doing, like in a professional like UX role, which is kind of fascinating.
Tim Broadwater
I didn’t think my job would be fun. Yeah, I was just like, what it’s funny when you’re saying, like, you’re stressed, and you kind of get beat down in UX, especially in the tech industry, right? It’s super stressful. And, and so actually, this game was super fun, and it’s enjoyable, and it makes me I love like all of the, you know, the design and the graphic pieces to it, and then the way that it operates, and then it actually doesn’t take that long to play either. So it actually has a finite number of rounds. And then once your whiteboard is kind of run out of things for the whiteboard, you’re the kind of the game’s over.
Sophia Prater
Yeah, there’s a deadline.
Michael Schofield
I love that the deadline is like is your budget and the the funness of the game and totally correlates to just how much money you have?
Tim Broadwater
How do people stay connected to you? And how do they find out about the game? And how do they like, you know, kind of get a hold of a copy for themselves to play?
Sophia Prater
Yeah, for sure. So if you’re interested and getting a copy, head over to OOUX.com/crosslinked. And then really, you know, OOUX.com is going to be the best place to go. I’m also on Twitter at @sophiavux. Yeah, and if you’re interested in that masterclass, and really kind of diving into this and going through the doozy of the online course that we’ve got, that’s going to be OOUX.com/masterclass.
Michael Schofield
Nice not to keep plugging the things you do. But you also I think, like relatively recently in like in the last quarter or so, like we launched your podcast too, right.
Sophia Prater
Um, we actually just put the podcasts on hold but…
Michael Schofield
Oh no.
Sophia Prater
So much going on. So yes, there is there is a podcast as well. So we got to I think 33 episodes. There was a little bit of a break in there and then we yeah, it’s just got so much going on. And as you know, it’s a lot of work. putting out a podcast. So that’s on hold to the end of the year. But But yes, I mean really those first two episodes of the podcast is a great primer. There’s like, what is OOUX, it’s basically a revamped version of that first original A List Apart article. And then the second episode is an audio workshops. So like pen and paper recommended, and it actually kind of takes you through a design challenge. So it’s a really great way to kind of get your hands dirty with it.
Tim Broadwater
Cool.
Michael Schofield
What other things can we plug that are now defunct?
Sophia Prater
Please subscribe to the podcast. The podcast is definitely it’s not it is just it is just on pause right now for a few months.
Tim Broadwater
Thank you so much for kind of, I want to say thank you for OOUX because I’ve used it many times. And it’s been very helpful to me. And it’s a great kind of understanding framework. The game is super fun. It is a blast. And I would say for gamers as well as for UXers. Definitely check it out. So thank you so much for coming on our episode.
Sophia Prater
Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.
Tim Broadwater
It’s the Moonlighter Minute brought to you by Design Thinking games.
Michael Schofield
Oh, thank you, Tim. Oh, perfect handoff to him this weather out here is hurricaney. All right. So at the beginning of the season, you prompted me to undertake a task. In response to a challenge I gave you the season prior, you had to play through Mass Effect, the Legendary Edition, you did, we talked about it, I had to play because of my relative lack of experience in this kind of genre. A a roguelike kind of like dungeon crawl thing i and that was Moonlighter which I’m going to here by rename as like that, Antinature’s Zelda.
Tim Broadwater
Antinature, pro capitalist Zelda.
Michael Schofield
Knowing that I was coming close to beating it, I busted out a journal and started just kind of like documenting a bunch of thoughts.
Tim Broadwater
The roguelike episode if you want to check it out. We actually I have I think we unpack and spend a decent amount of time talking about Moonlighter. What I want to know is how big is the journal you wrote down, and then what are your thoughts on the game? Like would like it don’t like it or like and then here in the last couple of weeks, you just beat it.
Michael Schofield
I sprinted through it so so I so here’s my thoughts. So I only have like a couple pages of just like scratch and I’ve actually died like I have a Windows notepad.exe of just all of this, but I gotta say, I’d like it if I had to give this like a score. Like out of 10. This is like a this is a grade out of 10. Right? This is an 8 I found it pretty endearing. The things that… here’s what I like about it. I discovered that I love town building and like investing in the town and building up that town and kind of like not like managing the shop and my trajectory of how I played is I got carried away so sort of there’s four dungeons there’s like a gollum dungeon, forest dungeon, a desert dungeon, and then like a tech dungeon, and then there’s like a special secret one. And basically what happened i i found that the way I played it was like I ground through as quickly as possible the first two dungeons purely so I could pop like like make money, unlock characters, and then that’s all I did. I was just managing my shop and I never went back to the dungeons
Tim Broadwater
Do you ever feel like it was like workaholic the game like it’s like I’m running a shop during the day and I’m adjusting my profits and and trying to get the best deal and supply and demand right but and then the part where you build up the town but then you don’t sleep it’s like you go to any worker night.
Michael Schofield
Exactly. Yeah, it’s very it’s very like user experience design because like you you stalk your customers and all of a sudden they have like, a, they have a user experience and you and you toggle back and forth. And what I love most is like when they have like a wonderful experience, that means you’re charging too little
Tim Broadwater
Make that money.
Michael Schofield
The perfect degree of user experience is like, moderately, okay? Right. You don’t want a great user experience because they’re not You’re not making them suffer enough. But my trajectory is that like, I ended up doing that. And then I just trailed off because like, schedules happened, school restarted. Then I finally like, like, knowing like, Okay, I’m gonna beat this game. I just totally flipped my strategy was like, All right, my talents doing pretty well. I’m just gonna grind through these dungeons. And so I would say that my experience of the game was sort of unbalanced. They were like, they felt like two very different games to me. That were very creative. Like, I mean, like, my favorite dungeon was the desert one like there are those, like the jinn that’s the that throw fireballs and the biggest snake like bosses? Devastating.
Tim Broadwater
It’s interesting. You said that, because I kind of want to hear more your thoughts about that? Because, yeah, very similar to a lot of other roguelike games, and no, in previous episodes, you know, since we talked about Moonlighter, we’ve talked about Cult of the Lamb. And it is very much a cult sim, but then it’s a dungeon and adventure grind as well. Moonlighter being like the products you sell in your store, you’re literally getting on your dungeon crawls. And so it is like, I think there’s something there. And then there’s also the town building piece, right. And so I feel like it’s kind of three games wove together. But it’s enjoyable to switch between them. What did you think?
Michael Schofield
I got tired of the dungeons. The so like, I was like, what Yeah, I would call there’s like a dungeon crawl. And I generally don’t gravitate toward those. And then there’s basically like a roller coaster tycoon game, right? Because you’re managing the town, and I…
Tim Broadwater
That ages you just by the way by saying Rollercoaster Tycoon, I get it.
Michael Schofield
I found that I got tired clearing the rooms and inventory managing, which I know is like just like, it’s just a big part of the thing. And then yeah, then I would then I would mess up and then I would die. And I for me, the missing component was that in the town, I can hire workers. I feel like I should have become rich enough and then hire an adventuring party to go do the dungeon for me. That’s a vastly different game. But I have like a lot of thoughts.
Tim Broadwater
That’s actually a big mechanic of Monster Hunter. Like if I don’t know if you’ve ever Monster Hunters. I’ve never played it. You get these felines and so there’s the same game and you can dress them and name them and whatever. And that’s, but then they go, you can equip them and they can go out and harvest and kill monsters for you. And then you don’t have to kind of keep going out and killing monsters because they’re kind of this ready supply, or they can do it. But you were saying feelings about that?
Michael Schofield
Yeah, like so like, I don’t know, like, so that part. There were components on both ends that became chores to me. And as we kind of like talked over the last couple of seasons, I prefer a very linear game that was minimal chore. And because other people find like kind of like, that kind of work, fairly meditative right? Looming thing. But for me, like, I was like, I got tired of running the shop. But then it’s literally at that moment. I was like, I can hire somebody. And I still really enjoy like building out the town. But I say that like so…
Tim Broadwater
Of the three you enjoyed the town building the most as opposed to the capitalist shop or the dungeon crawl killing, you know?
Michael Schofield
Yeah, I enjoyed the town building the most because like Moonlighter does some like things excellently. In fact, most of the things that does, I would say are expertly executed. I have notes here just about the interface. The tutorial was cute. The end of story, the twist at the end, about like, like, yeah, like, you don’t think these artifacts appear to these dungeons just like that, you know? Like, they’re like, like, there were things here that were like really good. And to me, this is a great example of like a great in class or like, I don’t know if you’d call it best in class because I haven’t played enough but like a great example of a genre of game. That is just not necessarily my cup of tea.
Tim Broadwater
When you were talking about the UI, you were like great game, I was into it, but UI, whatever the things you were picking out?
Michael Schofield
The UI was excellent. So, so the look and feel of the game, you know, the graphics were great, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m kind of talking about, like, the there’s certain things that I found that incredibly effective in part, you know, the customer experiences and mood and like in the shop, and how you were able to come around and do that they, they made some really smart choices for inventory management for bulk moving things like back and forth. The, when you encountered something new, the tutorial was like a horizontal scroll, like a like a papyrus scroll that opens like left to right. And it was basically step one, step two, step three and pixelart, emojis kind of right, it wasn’t like, they introduced concepts and mechanics, quite easily. And so there are things there that I just found it impressive, like, just being the kind of work that I do, like, I saw what maybe other people would just see as kind of like the, the chrome of the game that utilitarian aspects.
Tim Broadwater
You saw the interaction design.
Michael Schofield
I saw the interaction design, and I was like this was excellently done, excellently done.
Tim Broadwater
I’m glad to hear you say that, because I agree with that too. The bulk object management, the ability to just walk around like you’re saying, and on the fly be like No, raise that $2 or no, put that down. $2. So it sells better. Great. Yeah.
Michael Schofield
There are little things that are really convenient, like, oh, no, like, I’m, I’m out of inventory. It was like, Well, if you’ve done your job, and you have a little bit of coin, they let you teleport back, right, you know, so everything has like a cost. And they give you little, not cheats, but they give you ways out of what would otherwise be painful situations.
Tim Broadwater
And grinding horrible experiences. Yeah. If you have a horrible, if you I find that if you have like these, when it does very well I agree with you is that these repetitive, horrible things like inventory management, or like traveling or being able to say for like, there’s if this doesn’t work, what’s the workaround, so it doesn’t make me hate the game as a user, but it actually allows me like, okay, how do I just do this quicker, gain it, or do it as simple as possible.
Michael Schofield
We should get, we should give the opening scene like a lot of credit, because you’re just dropped into a dungeon and it’s a dungeon you’re not meant to survive, and it whips your ass. It teaches you like, like how to kind of do that like kind of shoulder roll thing around and how to use the basic mechanics. And it takes you I don’t know, like five minutes or whatever, and then it dumps you into the story. And you’re pretty set. From there. The mechanics don’t get more complicated, ever, like after. Like, there’s something here like with like, the player experience model where mechanics could potentially stack and get more complicated. I’m imagining games where like, oh, it’s like now you have a like a grappling hook for an arm and you can traverse and you can actually do more than you could before. Yeah. And then what I think Moonlighter did, which is the alternative is that the mechanics for a category of actions actually never really change. They just give you more actions they just give you way more things to do now you manage this town, now you hire people, now you can invest because there’s a broker wandering around town. And I like really dug. Yeah, so I was like here’s a thousand gold, please give me a good return. You know.
Tim Broadwater
Okay, so you’re going in these dungeons like you’re saying at night and then in the day you’re like, stocking your shop and raising profit and if you over saturate your market with too much the same thing prices go down and you have to lower but the shit you’re selling is weird as fuck right? And then you kind of find out over time once you go through three or four dungeons, you beat the game so you know what’s at the end and what the story is, right? How do you feel about that? Was that like, a smack in the face for like fantasy games? Or like what did you think?
Michael Schofield
No. Like I loved it. So yeah, so basically, you know, but what I love is that no one ever questions like these other kinds of games like let’s we spent the entire like last like episode prior to this like dogpiling on Elden Ring. No one wonders like oh, why are there so many artifacts and these random-ass and dungeons? But I liked it. I thought it was funny. I did one of those guffaws like HA just because it was clever. Like everything about it was clever. I liked Xenon, like the old guy. I had some of I had some favorite characters. I don’t think I loved there’s kind of like a crafting element to it grew kind of in a way that you could go to get potions made and stuff like that, like…
Tim Broadwater
Yeah, I think I did that so much. Yeah.
Michael Schofield
Same, yeah, I don’t need a ton of that in my life. But I think overall a really successful game, I feel like I have been introduced to a solid candidate into this style, or this genre of game. Yeah, that, that to your to the whole point of doing this in the first place is one that I would not go to voluntarily myself.
Tim Broadwater
Next year, which we should both challenge each other simultaneously?
Michael Schofield
Yeah, yeah. I feel pretty schooled man.
Tim Broadwater
Not me sitting out, are you sitting out, but we should just challenge each other. And then I think we want to say just seasons done. Thanks for listening. And we are planning to be at PAX Unplugged. And just to go, we may do some interviews that we’re kind of gonna get some audio interviews there. We may do some offseason stuff, or maybe we will not have stuff until season three. So we’ll see how it all shakes out.
Michael Schofield
Yeah, I think the season proper has come to an end. But we are still going to be like kind of like out in the world at PAX Unplugged, probably recording different stuff. We are working on some things that at some point will tell people about but I think it’s safe to say like, hey, we appreciate like folks who find this interesting, or at least talking to us, you know. And unlike other podcasts out there, it’s like, we definitely will be back for season three and probably a season four because we’re very long term plan planners, and we have like cool stuff like coming in the future. You should support us on Patreon. At patreon.com/designthinkinggames by and affordable and delightful advertisement. If for instance, I don’t know, consider reaching out to us with different ideas about things you want to do. What if Design Thinking Games partnered with you in some potential way? Let us imagine what the future of this little brand is as we go out. That’s what we’re really excited about doing. We’re going out into the world together physically, post COVID.
Tim Broadwater
Yeah, it will actually be the first time we’ve never met in real space. Every now I know. Yeah. We’ve known each other for years and years and years, but we’ve never actually met in real.
Michael Schofield
Somewhere out there on the internet or like old interviews where we are talking about like library web design and stuff like…
Tim Broadwater
UX certification and yeah.
Michael Schofield
Still not worth it.
Tim Broadwater
I love it. One day, we will make a game about the hellscape that is libraries and make that a board game to play. I don’t know.
Introductory Guy
Thank you for listening to the Design Thinking games podcast. You only have so much time and it means a lot you shared it with us to connect with your hosts Michael or Tim. Visit Design Thinking games on tick tock twitch and Twitter DMS are open. You can also check out designthinkinggames.com where you can request topics, ask questions or see what else is going on. Until next time, game on!
