The Problem
SongPop Party, our multiplayer music trivia game, was launched on Apple Arcade in 2021. The following year it became available on the Switch, Xbox, and the Microsoft Store with Playstation and Steam not far behind.
Players were asking for a way to talk to each other, but we were not about to implement an open-ended chat for an all-ages game. Instead, we designed a canned chat feature with predetermined phrases. The challenge was having it feel natural and intuitive across all the platforms and devices including touch screens, several brands of game controllers, keyboards, and the Siri remote.
The Solution
I led our UI Artist and our Animator through researching existing patterns for these types of interactions, then prototyping for each input type using Figma plugins for different controllers. Having just emerged from the pandemic, we found a lot of value in being able to test the prototypes in-person with the controllers in hand.
We came up with three interaction formats based on device/input combos: a compact chat wheel for large TVs that accommodated eight local players, a full-screen wheel for solo players on smaller devices, and a fly-out menu for touch screens.
Our first iterations were a bit unwieldy with too many buttons to hold down at the same time, so we decided to simplify it so that it was more widely accessible to include:
- younger kids
- people who may have never used a game controller before (like my parents)
- people who may have limited motor control
The Results
We shipped three solid variations of the same functions that felt perfectly at home on each device type or input mode. Our beta testers, who had been asking for a chat feature for a long time, were really happy with how it turned out.
A lot of the best testing and experimentation that we did took place in person. For a party game, this made total sense. While we worked distributed most of the time (spread between three locations), our in-person sessions were very productive and I’d definitely do it this way again for designing a local multiplayer game.