Ideation of how to present upcoming game releases in the most engaging manner possible was a significant part of my work at Xbox. Teaming up with two graphic designers and a copywriter, we produced a mini-game that introduced the world of Witcher in form of a quest. I designed the game rules, directed the sound effects and animation, and wrote the code. Whenever the game studios provided amazing assets and creative freedom, the job did not feel like work.
The mini-game, starting at 2:07 min, was a part of an Xbox application this video captures in its entirety. The first two minutes feature work of another developer on our team.
Challenging quizzes with a leaderboard proved to be the most successful engagement vehicles we came up with. Data showed some users played a given quiz hundreds of times to see their name rank among the top ten participants. I designed the quiz to have several levels of difficulty, randomized order of answers, and a merciless timer. The system guaranteed players could not simply guess their way towards victory. The studios were happy to supply us with dozens of interesting questions of various depth of nerdiness.
Promotion of Gears of War was the first one to feature the competitive quiz with a leaderboard. Eventually, I modified the build to enable customization via content management system by implementing images, color scheme, sounds, and font-type relevant to each game being promoted.
Before we had a leaderboard available for designing competitive quizzes, we made due with designing trivia games. Albeit less challenging, they were still fun to build.
Here are a few examples of ideas for content presentations that would drive user engagement and sales on Xbox One console via dashboard programming. Gearing up to build interactive promotional experiences on Xbox One, the team faced interesting challenges due to a different mindset needed when designing navigation and interactivity driven by a controller rather than a mouse.
NEXT ON XBOX
TEAM CHALLENGE: Present the upcoming schedule in a simple, but attractive manner, while providing users with an intuitive way to share an interesting item, or to add a reminder to their calendar.
MY ROLE: Build the JavaScript application based on image comps and extensive communication with the designer & fine-tune the feel and flow of the user journey among/from top-level pages to submitting a selection. We loved this design, unfortunately it did not quite fit with the Xbox dash ecosystem.
PROMOTING NEW CONTENT
TEAM CHALLENGE: Create an example of a complex content presentation that would accommodate variety of media; be comfortably navigable on Xbox console; and could be easily skinned for repeated use.
MY ROLE: Turn the wire-frames and provided assets into a JavaScript/JSON application; drive the design of the button behavior and tile carousel elements. This design became one of the favorites in the following three years
GOING GOLD
TEAM CHALLENGE: Brainstorm presentation of membership sale with attractive, yet informative imagery, while including terms & conditions in an unobtrusive manner.
MY ROLE: Build the prototype. Aside from the interactive panel animation, the build included a subtle animation of the background image.
VERTICAL SCROLLING
TEAM CHALLENGE: Think outside the box when navigating around. Rolodex-inspired exercise examining the look and feel of scrolling through content in both directions.
MY ROLE: Build a functioning prototype to showcase, test and see if we may be onto something. We decided to nix the whole thing because it felt a tad cumbersome.
Working with a graphic designer, I developed a JavaScript application to collect feedback from Xbox users. Successful interactivity of the application would not have been possible without understanding the challenges stemming from navigation by the Xbox controller instead of a mouse.
Within several hours of launching an instance of the feedback, the Xbox Programming Team was able to collect enough data to gauge the mood of its audience.
Often facing a task of presenting a slew of beautiful audio tracks, or interesting promotional videos, we decided to build a media player suitable for a controller navigation. I helped design the interactivity and animation, and wrote the code base. The media player was easy to skin using assets provided by the studios behind the releases we chose to feature.
This video shows the playlist customized for a campaign promoting the premiere of the third season of Game of Thrones.
