I joined Chaotic Games as the founding designer to help evolve their web-based game engine into a fully functional studio editor for game developers around the world. I led design on every aspect of our business and was responsible for UX and UI across all engine features and internal games, leading to Chaotic's first two game studio partnerships, two deployed games, and proof of product-market-fit with investors.
To better understand both our engine's scale and the competition it faced, I conducted a UX audit of it's initial version and supplemented the results with key findings derived from a series of user interviews with game developers and artists using other game engines. It became clear that it was important to ensure that our engine evolved to include a studio editor that maintained a level of familiarity to our audience, as to enable early adoption with ease while also delivering features that filled critical gaps found in other editors' workflows.
Jakob's Law, Hick's Law, and the Aesthetic Usability Effect were among many principles of UX that needed to be further considered in our studio editor's design in order to establish trust with users willing to adopt it. However, I also found that most users had grown so comfortable with other engines' interface arrangements that many of their navigation habits would be a challenge for us to break. I took inspiration from these to inform our studio editor's information architecture (IA), but I distilled only the most critical workflows as they applied to an an ECS (entity component system) engine like ours. This also helped solve for the bloat our users claimed other engines' workflows burdened them with.
Our studio editor's IA would introduce clarity and ease of use to red route features and critical task flows. I leveraged AI to A/B these against common engine red routes in competing engines. These included boot and relaunch, asset component relationship referencing, real time remote collaboration, and lightning fast preview and deployment of games to the web. Our goal was to get 5+ studios successfully using the engine to serve 10,000+ players.
I took the opportunity to develop a visual design system from the very beginning. Each piece of real estate in our editor was created with the intention to serve a very specific informational and functional purpose. These areas of the editor interface would be referred to as "panels." Each panel shared common UI elements which I designed as the foundational atoms to the design system. As I helped onboard studios into the engine, I opened feedback loops to better understand what features might solve their specific challenges and ensured the panel system was flexible enough to meet their needs.
This scalable design process would lead to composing the entire studio editor experience, including viewport navigation and manipulation, behavior tree definition, visual effects creation, asset loading and compression, component creation, commenting, play session viewing, and more. Every facet of the experience incorporated rapidly sketching, UI/UX design, prototyping, AI "gut checking" and testing with internal and curated user pools.
We went from functioning engine with a basic prototype of a studio editor to being able to create, script, and deploy console-quality games directly to the web, freely and accessibly. I took the engine's experience from no adoption to serving 4 separate studios, 2 of which deployed games in a matter of 12 months, one of which was showcased at Gamescon. In addition, the engine served Chaotic's internal debut title which bolstered and maintaine investor interest. This engine and its studio editor has proven it can liberate game developers – freeing them from the likes of publishers, platforms, stores, etc. You can now create the highest quality games and deliver them immediately to the largest possible audience.
More details about this project are available on request.
