Solo Project
UI/UX Case Study
Weapon Forge is a Dungeons & Dragons inspired weapon customizer application concept. This case study was made in 2020 for a UI seminar, and was not developed into a final application. When developing this project, I was new to TTRPGs, and made a few character concepts with the assistance from my friends and programs such as Hero Forge. While I was able to make characters easily, I found that there was little to no programs focused on fantasy weapons, which inspired me to make a fantasy weapon customizer for my semester project. I was also inspired to make a little quiz section that would help new players like myself find weapons that they would enjoy for their characters!
At the time of the project and research, there was not a lot of apps or programs that revolved around fantasy weapons or weapon customizers. The main program that was highlighted was Hero Forge, which focused on characters rather than weapons themselves. While there could be weapons added to character models, at the time there wasn’t a lot of customization to the weapons themselves.
When designing the flow of the project, I broke the application into three states: a quiz section, a results page, and a customization page. The quiz section would be entirely optional, where user’s would be asked a few questions to gauge their play style and offer a few weapon types for them to choose from. The results page would be after the quiz where the player would receive three weapons to choose from, or they could reject those options and then choose from a library of weapons. The customization page would be the main focus, where user’s can mess with different materials, colors, wear marks, and special effects. To plan out the flows visually, I made a sitemap and a user flow chart.
Once I had the user flow set, I started making mockups in Figma. For the mockups, I focused on the flow and layout rather than an art style, mainly gray-boxing everything rather than making it look nice.
For usability testing, I brought my Figma mockups into Maze, a program that shows heatmaps where users tap on the screen. It helps paint a picture where pain points are in the flow. I wasn’t able to get many people to test for me, but my friends who were well versed in TTRPGs helped me out. They gave me feedback on the material options, which had me remove curses on weapons, which now looking back on it I wish I kept because it as a player I have used cursed weapons in campaigns.
From the testing, I saw that ¾ users clicked on the arrow in the dialogue box to progress, and testers struggled with understanding that the materials came from a catalog and the weapon was supposed to look like a sketch on paper, like the shop owner was sketching out what the weapon would look like. Unfortunately, after the test, I was not able to perform anymore testing due to the coronavirus pandemic and the limitations associated with that.
The main aspect of the project was the weapons, but as I had so many different ideas on weapon types I needed help to condense them to keep the work load bearable. I made a list of weapons and broke them down based on range, and then added different materials for the handles and blades. From there I asked people to pick their favorites and those options would be my selection!
As the coronavirus pandemic continued, it became harder to focus on building a prototype. I made a basic concept in Unity with no art, then made the quiz section have art and new fonts, but it didn’t go much further than that. After the semester, I was inspired to redraw the shop keep character and store asset.
Overall, this was a fun and interesting project as someone who was getting into TTRPGs and learning more about Dungeons & Dragons. It was fascinating to see that at the time of research there weren’t a lot of fantasy weapon customizers out there, but it was fun testing a bunch of character customizers for research. While I did not have a finished prototype at the end, it was a good exercise to research users, competition, as well as create user flows, mockups, and surveys.
