EverMerge

June 2022 - Sept 2023

This Game Studio
(Title published by Big Fish Games)

Manager: Prachi Pradhan

Feature Flow
UI Design
Prototyping
UnityGUI Greyboxing

Photoshop, Figma, Unity

Image Source: https://www.deconstructoroffun.com/blog/2020/12/6/how-evermerge-made-50m-in-just-7-months

EverMerge is a match 3 sandbox style puzzle game, published by Big Fish Games.

View on App Store or Google Play

At This Game Studio as a UX Designer, I worked on several features for this game, including a Battle Pass (Merge Pass), a storage / inventory system (Backpack), as well as a new game mode (Hero Storylands).

Contents (in order of release)

1/ Merge Pass (Battle Pass)

2/ Hero Storylands

Merge Pass (Battle Pass)

Marketing video from Facebook, using final designs (excluding Merge Pass logos)

This was the first feature I worked on when joining the EverMerge TGS team. The mockups were already in progress, which I took over and updated throughout discussions with our stakeholders.

1. Low fidelity Mockups
The designs were done in Photoshop, then shared with our clients and game designers.

Challenges:

Localization -
As the game supports 12 different languages, piling too much information can break the structure of a window. To solve this issue, I created two different variations of the info window which allowed the "Earn Points" to appear either as a grid or a list view. Fortunately, the localization team was able to trim text down and we were able to go with the grid view, which illustrated the method of earning points much clearer.

2. Prototypes
After completing the mockups, I created prototypes using Figma in order to demonstrate the user flow. This allowed designers and engineers to understand how the UI works and comment on if necessary.

3. Greyboxing Implementation
At This Game Studio, the UX Designers are responsible for implementing the UI in Unity, as it allows us to control the quality of the UI and polish it if necessary.
Even though this process was new to me, I was able to seamlessly work with UGUI and implement the UI as per the mockups.

4. Final Outcome

Hero Storylands

Marketing video from Facebook, using final designs

Hero Storylands was the largest game mode I worked on for EverMerge. This feature was aimed at mid to late game players, and to provide more narrative depth to the characters in game.

1. UI Flows
I started by translating the game designers' documentation through creating flows for each part of the game mode. This included the First Time User Experience (FTUE), as well as steps for each new feature.

This allowed the whole production team to fully understand how each part worked about the first design pass, and serves as a reminder on designing for how the user would engage with the screen.

2. Mockups and Prototypes

Based on the flows, I started creating mockups in Figma, as it was easier to whip up design variations quickly in order to explore what worked and what could be done better.

When the mockups were too confusing, I created prototypes to demonstrate how a user would interact with the new features, as well as creating placeholder art prior receiving the official art.

3. Implementation, Art Import

After all the mockups were complete, I implemented the UI in Unity, ensuring they were as per the mockups and polishing them when necessary.

As we were responsible for the game mode, UX designers were also responsible for getting art assets into the game. Throughout this process, there were a few hurdles that I ran into, and I documented my solutions to them, in order to help my colleagues or anyone who would came across the same issue.

4. Final Outcome

Several sourced Images from r/Evermerge