The constantly evolving content and updates in WWE Champions 2019 mobile game makes keeping it up to date a real challenge.
In this project I moved to Vietnam to work with Gear Inc.
The studio was a third party developer, which apart from their own in-house games, was supporting WWE Champions and other games.
WWE Champions is a mobile game that brings the world of wrestling to the palm of your hand. The game features an extensive roster of WWE wrestlers, past and present, that players can collect and upgrade to build their ultimate wrestling team.
Players compete in various game modes such as Story Mode, Versus Mode, and Live Events, where they battle against other players’ teams or AI-controlled opponents. The game’s mechanics are a mix of puzzle and RPG elements, where players need to match gems of different colours to perform moves and attacks.
In this particular role, I became a Lead in charge on both the mentorship of UX designers, but also as a feedback giver for the UI artists, making the communication between them stable.
There was also a constant communication between Scopely and us, especially on the moment of approval of the various proposals.
During my time in this project there were two main things happening.
The first was a new feature called Titles, which was practically an equipment system, skinned as title belts, in which were the player was able to build their own set of belts for each wrestel.
The main challenge was to fit the whole clutter of the system into the already existing UI, which followed by a series of iterations which brought us to what is the current look of the feature.
The other challenge was the process of revamping the landing page, which took us a lot of time.
As you can see from the proposals below we had to follow different compromises, to fit all the features but at the same time highlight the main selling point of the game: the characters.
The main learnings in this project is that despite all the good intentions, trying to revamp a whole UI of an already released game is not easy. We need to take in consideration the consequences on changing a behaviour of hardcore fans. But at the same time it highlights how important is to properly design a UX at the beginning, taking in consideration the space that new features will take. Foreseeing the growth and evolution of a game in the worse case scenario is always a good idea.