GameMaker’s Design Team Talk at UX Scotland
Our two expert UX navigators, Scott McCallum and Neve O'Neill, represented GameMaker at the UX Scotland Conference at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. We spoke to Scott about the design team's experience and how they’re reinventing the game engine.
If you’d like to have your say in how GameMaker’s features work, we’re collecting UX feedback.
But first, what on earth is UX design?
Good question. I always get this face when I tell people what my job is - 🤨
UX or "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
Any digital product you use today will have a UX design process to translate complicated technical systems into tangible (hopefully), easy-to-understand interfaces for users to interact with. Not just how it looks, but how it works and feels to use.
Basically, without UX design your life would be, specifically, 897463872827x more complicated. Good UX is invisible UX, and we are the secret heroes of the tech world…
Although as a UX designer, I’m a wee bit biassed.
GameMaker’s Design Team
I, Scott McCallum, have been a UX/UI Designer for GameMaker for seven years now. In that time GameMaker has redesigned the Asset Browser, Inspector Window, new Window Paradigm, the new Code Editor, Workflow Changes, and much, much more! I’m even working on some secret stuff you don’t know about yet. I’ll never tell!
My co-speaker for the talk was Neve O’Neill, they are GameMaker’s Junior UX designer and bring invaluable game design experience and in-depth competitor understandings to design features.
We were the only people speaking but this was also a full team effort including the graphic designer Jaiden Irvine, and GameMaker’s Design Lead, Mark Traynor, who was accepted onto the UX Scotland panel and did an amazing job at advising and advocating for the conference in itself.
The GameMaker team were the first representatives from the games industry to ever talk at the conference. No pressure, right?
How Did You Prepare?
The conference we were speaking at was called UX Scotland and was held in Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh. A massive three day event full of the UX design worlds biggest and best… and of course, us! So we wanted to find the most interesting topic we could.
We sat down and brainstormed case studies of the feature design processes that went well (the new code editor) and features that didn’t go so well (Sequences), but the topic we finally settled on was - “Can you reinvent the engine? - product design for the games industry”.
This gets into the nitty gritty of making large scale UX changes to an existing product, navigating: roadmaps, busy schedules, technical limitations, legacy features, industry trends, work events, “we need more AI”, and all the other obstacles faced within a large software company. All the while keeping users happy.
Then, we took off our design hats, sharpened our pencils, and dove into the new world of writing for public speaking.
Time To Talk
The funny thing about agreeing to talk at a massive conference is that the realisation of “IT’S HAPPENING” doesn’t really hit you until you are manically making last minute changes to your presentation late the night before in your hotel room.
“Memes will make it better, right?!”
“Is this too technical?”
“Why can’t I stop yappin’ and stick to the script?!”
Changes sparked fear in my co-speaker, Neve O’Neill, as I hunted for the perfect memes to illustrate what it's like to be a UX/UI Product Designer at GameMaker. I felt good about our talk, but the perfectionist in me needed to make sure that people would truly enjoy it.
Arriving at UX Scotland
We arrived in Edinburgh to find - sun? Yes, Scotland is in fact capable of good weather.
The UI/UX team largely works remotely so getting the whole team here together was a special occasion. As nice as it is not travelling to the office every day, nothing quite beats an easy in-person chat.
We networked with UX, UI, and service designers, project managers, and product strategists, and attended impressive talks, workshops, and jigsaw puzzles - our graphic designer, Jaiden Irvine, was even crowned word search puzzle champ between sessions.
Sadly we were unable to escape the clutches of corporate networking to explore the volcano section of Dynamic Earth, but maybe next time!
Our Talk
It was the end of lunch and we got set up in our room, eagerly waiting for people to come. With only five minutes to go, the room was empty, but thankfully, as we began to speak, people dropped their lunch, picked up their coffees, and filled up the room.
Is a full room a good or a bad thing? I thought to myself as I started speaking. Pressure!
We started by introducing GameMaker and the amazing games made with our tool. Then Neve took the reins to explain more about the background of the engine: our long history, the many Users we have (that’s you!), and their Users (those are your players!).
With everyone from beginners to professionals using GameMaker, almost every feature has to work for all experiences - and with over 20 years of development, GameMaker has a lot of legacy quirks to either elevate or workaround.
I then talked about the process and the steps taken when designing features in real life. This included finding and targeting pain points, breaking those down into the impact on release, and then the actual design process itself. Nerdy stuff.
Designing creative tools massively differs from any other realm of design. There are challenges we face because there are so many different types of people using our tool with different levels of ability and the tools can all provide countless ways to achieve an end goal… it's complicated stuff!
If you ask five people to make the same game in GameMaker, all of them will approach it differently. Making our day to day work life interesting, to say the least.
Some of you guys even made it into the talk!
Final Thoughts
We absolutely loved the experience of talking at UX Scotland and with such a large turnout it was great to be the first representative from the games industry to speak at the event. The feedback was tremendous and it surprisingly revealed that I, Scott McCallum, am a freak and love public speaking.
The design team is always striving to evolve and improve the engine we all use and love. The community is the key driving force behind that and we’d love to get everybody involved in reinventing the engine.
If you’d like to have your say in how GameMaker’s features work, we’re collecting UX feedback.
