Hello. We are the development team LIFUEL. We are currently focusing on developing game content. Our development diary has been delayed. It hasn't been easy organizing past writings and finding photos. There have been many trials and errors in writing about the game's system, leading us to ponder how best to articulate our process.
We ended up writing quite a bit. While we intended to keep it brief, the volume might be somewhat tedious. We hope you can get a good sense of how we developed our game through this development process.
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Problem Solving Approach
The problems we perceived at the time were as follows:
1. There are too many tables, making cursor movement inconvenient.
2. It's unclear what the parts are.
3. The concept of modifying skills is difficult to grasp.
4. Even understanding the concept of modification, it's unclear what the difference is.
5. Etc.
These have been the issues we've felt while playing the game. Truthfully, there might be more severe problems and many more minor ones. Because of our lack of understanding, we've attempted various approaches step by step.
Attempt 1: First UIUX
Because the concepts of passive and active were unfamiliar, we changed the UIUX to explain them more intuitively.
We divided each icon more clearly using red and yellow, and all main skills were designed in blue. We created empty slots to give the feeling that parts could be equipped and, at that time, even created a UI for changing the basic attack in all four directions to somehow preserve the modification of basic attacks. Now, it appears the skill quick slots have also changed to a design similar to the current one.
After creating this, we took our game to an offline game show in 2022, where about 30 people played our game. We watched them very closely. Some feedback was quite harsh but detailed regarding icon design, and there were those who didn't understand how it worked, quickly tapping the keyboard and getting up but kindly lied, saying, "It was really fun!"
The memory was so shocking that the results are still vividly remembered.
Success
1. Every player who played understood the existence of passive and active.
Unsuccessful Issues
1. Overall UX discomfort.
2. Incomprehension of basic attack modification.
3. Lack of growth feeling.
4. Lack of interaction feedback.
Knowing where users were struggling and how they moved differently from our intentions should have been good, but there were so many issues at the time that our programmer started doing emergency patches every day for four days as soon as we returned to the hotel. Despite the pressure of the event duration, working two hours a day for a week, the programmer eventually fell ill.
After that, we took a brief rest for about three days to recuperate and decided to move on to the next attempt. During the revision, we removed the modification of basic attacks because it made the system more complicated and increased the number of skills, parts, and modules since the feeling of skill-building was not strong enough.
Thus, we solidified our planning and moved on.
Attempt 2: Considering Growth Methods
We contemplated the progression method.
Initially, we shifted from giving items as rewards upon clearing battles to allowing players to choose rewards from a box to preserve the rogue-like element. This was a common progression method in the action rogue-lite genre, and we didn't think it caused a major problem.
However, this UX did not fit well with acquiring and modifying skills, as it required many operations. So, we attempted the following.
In the second attempt, we created a modification room (this is somewhat like the initial appearance of a shop). We designed a machine for modifications and provided various functions, allowing modifications through interaction. Considering players would want to try skills in an action game, we added a feature to reselect them. We also included features to increase the upgrade probability by spending more money, among other things.
This was the UI that appeared when interacting with a vending machine-like device. We paid a lot of attention to convenience. The design shifted from entering many keys in all directions to being cleaner and showing more information.
Not only choosing one out of three options but also designing the skill deckbuilding direction by allowing the use of currency to obtain higher-grade skills.
In modification, while skills were given random abilities, we included features in the UI that allowed for desired abilities to appear through the use of currency. Detailed system understanding was facilitated by placing the current skill information on the right side for easy viewing.
We then conducted another test. This system underwent internal and external testing for about six months. The results were as follows.
Success
1. UX became relatively easier.
Unsuccessful Issues
1. Unpopular and somewhat arcane layout design.
2. Still no feeling of growth.
3. Lack of interaction feedback.
4. Unnecessary modifications.
In summary, besides becoming slightly prettier and a bit more convenient, nothing significant had changed. Players still didn't understand the game's core, and surprisingly, many bypassed purchasing skills because the interacting machine resources were too small, clustered, and could be stepped over.
We tried to directly instruct interaction through target UI focusing and adding various devices, but it did not fundamentally solve the issue.
What did we miss?
After observing players and receiving a lot of feedback, we decided to consider a progression method suitable for us. Even if it's different from existing games, we aimed to create an understandable UIUX for anyone.
In December 2022, we began our third attempt to create a better UX.
Attempt 3: Introduction of Maps and Major UIUX Overhaul
In our third attempt, we came up with several ideas and refined the best ones. The skill modification UIUX is closely related to growth, combat rewards, and skill practice, so we adopted a new space called the train and a map-based movement system.
Inside the train, skills could be pre-used, and combat areas and reward spaces were divided, making the game clearer, albeit somewhat inconvenient.
Skills were now chosen not through the UI but directly at field altars, reducing UI fatigue. Modification was newly revamped by dividing it into "Part Drawing" and "Equipping" phases.
The vending machine was replaced with a new robot shop, and given the abundance of information, we focused heavily on minimizing it. We considered many ways to make modification more comfortable with minimal key operations.
Good news came in February 2023, as we stabilized the team by welcoming a friend who had been helping with the scenario as a team member, becoming a team of three. This allowed us to systematically distribute the workload, which had been overly burdensome for each member.
The UIUX revamp was vigorously pursued to align with the changed system. The traces of hardship can be seen during that period.
Based on the created UIUX, we conducted playtests in March 2023.
The image at that time is as follows.
Afterward, we continuously improved the UI by incorporating feedback on text color, icons, and design details.
The UIUX convenience results from about 4 months of work, from March onwards, are as follows:
Success
1. UX became much more comfortable.
2. What passive and active are is clear.
This attempt was quite successful. We resolved almost all the issues that had been problematic, and the game improved rapidly.
All the content we had created came to life thanks to UIUX, and people gave a lot of feedback on combat and other convenience features. (The era of feedback flooding in just for UIUX had ended)
Thus, the game remained open to the public after the demo in July, showcasing continuous changes and gaining confidence in the game
Though there might have been minor issues, we believed that addressing these minor problems would lead to further improvements. Feedback also included such minor issues. Therefore, we began developing an upgraded version of the current UX to address issues like the small text size and lack of physical space to write skill information.
Just before applying the final UIUX design to the game, the team leader raised a concern.
“There is a problem with this UIUX. We need to remake it.”
Problem 1: It's unclear that passives also affect actives.
Problem 2: In the modification phase, it's hard to feel how good the reward I chose is.
We fell into new dilemmas over whether to leave these issues to the users' learning phase or to create a more friendly and clear UIUX. After much deliberation, we decided to discard the above UX. (Although we had told our discord community we would be working with it...)
We resolved to create an even more friendly and new UIUX.
Final Attempt 4: Providing Previews
We thought that providing a UI to preview modification results would solve the above problems. However, with no more space left on the screen, we contemplated how to efficiently arrange it from various angles.
You can see from the photo how many cases we considered.
Thus, over about two months, we developed a new UIUX and released the initial model of its current form.
We created a modification reward phase, and in this UI, whenever you attempt to modify your skill, the left preview immediately reflects the values. You can now understand which skill combinations are more efficient, which are not efficient now but will improve, and how to change poor efficiencies into good ones. Detailed information is immediately reflected, so many people might feel the game anew based on this development.
Additionally, from this point, we decided whether to name active skills "sequential skills" or "follow-up skills," eventually settling on "combo skills." The method of operation changed from UI-only to being integrated with the player's movement.
Recently, new players have often been seen creating actions with combos, and some veteran players have crafted incredible combo builds to swiftly defeat bosses. (This was by design, though we thought it might be too challenging for many to discover.)
Conclusion
Despite the long journey, the reason we persisted is that we are gamers ourselves.
We aimed to mitigate the typical problems of having to collect a set of items determined by the developer and not being able to clear the game if failing to do so, or the game becoming increasingly difficult to clear due to complicated patterns, with our skill-building system. Though roguelikes are games of chance, we believed such a system could create a game with less displeasure from luck.
Even though it took longer, we continually sought feedback to make a good game, which significantly helped us.
Now, moving beyond the stabilization phase, we aim to create a game where players can feel . We plan to design content where the skill-building created by the player's hard thoughts and designs is not just simple synergy but truly holds significant value.
We are incredibly grateful for all the feedback we received, which helped the game grow, even as issues with game design prolonged the development period. The long UIUX development that began in April 2022 stretched out but ultimately concluded in a positive direction.
We are continuing with the stage work, creating new monsters and battles. These will be even more enjoyable than the first stage boss.
While the UIUX seems to have been finalized, we are considering a very minor adjustment based on all the feedback and play styles we've observed so far. This might be a lighter topic, so we plan to develop it when there's more time after the content update.
We will occasionally post updates on our work, even if they are late.
Thank you for reading this long post.
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