The design and use of psychology for good UX in games and beyond with Kingsley Hopking

UI Therapy | UI Design and Development Podcast

UIT 2: Kingsley talks about how he prototypes games, the current project he and his team is working on (a 3D Platformer game called Frog Island).

He also talks about another side project of his; a procedural games engine to generate worlds.

Kingsley talks about his thesis; ‘Approach for designing complexity in games’ which focuses the UX in games, and how principles from psychology and design theory can be used to teach players about affordances and signifiers. Also explores chunking of complex information (and abstractions), spaced learning techniques and the limitations of the human mind in terms of maximum amount of working memory. We also explore the idea of soft tutorials in games, and how they might be usable within Web or App experiences too.

We talk about his game, Frog Island, where he employs a lot of the ideas from the thesis as a test case. Tracking in-game to find and fix broken aspects of the UX.

Finally we move onto wrap-up questions.
Complete notes at https://uitherapy.fm/episodes/2/

Links

• Frog Island: https://ojaypopedev.itch.io/frog-island
• BeardyKing: https://twitter.com/beardyking
• Frogislandgame: https://twitter.com/frogislandgame
• Shader Graph: https://unity.com/shader-graph
• Celia Hodent - The Gamer's Brain: How Neuroscience and UX Can Impact Video Game Design: https://uitherapy.fm/thegamersmind
• Game Maker’s Toolkit: https://twitter.com/gamemakerstk
• Unity: https://unity.com/
• Unreal Engine: https://www.unrealengine.com/
• Frostbite Engine: https://www.ea.com/frostbite
• Cryengine: https://www.cryengine.com/

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