I’m going to talk a little bit here about some UX design strategies in Fortnite (one of my favorite games) that take the player experience to another level.
The work of the user experience designer, commonly known as UX Designer, is present in several areas today, whether in digital products/services as well as in physical ones. So, it’s evident that they are present even in the games industry and when their jobs are well done, playing becomes a much more pleasurable, natural, and much better activity.
HUD
When creating a game, the designer has to ensure that the player doesn’t need to remember a lot of important information because of our memory is limited, and we forget things all the time.
For this reason, what is done is to place the most important information on the screen or in pop-up windows to reduce the player’s memory load.
If you look closely, the Fortnite HUD has a lot of important information for the player that helps him understand what’s going on. For example, in the area where the items/weapons appear, the necessary buttons appear to access those items and in the “containers” of the guns there are smaller icons that indicate the type of ammunition that each weapon uses, so the player does not need to remember of it all the time.
In Fortnite, they always indicate which buttons are needed to perform certain special actions, as in the example above, where it indicates the button “B” to edit the building and the button “X” to equip the wall trap. Also, in the lower right corner, there are indications of the “LB” and “RB” buttons to switch between structures. Imagine having to remember all that while an enemy is trying to kill you. It would be very hard!
Other elements indicated on the screen are the life and shield bars, which are very important during the game, the amount of materials available, materials spent when building, and the amount of ammunition.
Harvesting
The harvesting feature in Fortnite is one of the most important (or it was before the non-building mode, mainly) and so the designers tried to make it more intuitive and easy to understand what is happening. Two feedbacks are used here, a visual one, which is the circle indicating a weak point in the structure as in the image above, and a sound feedback, with a sound that gets more intense as it gets closer to destroying that structure.
Loading screen
An interesting strategy present in Fortnite since “Early Access” is the loading screen with gameplay tips. The loading screen is present in all games, and in some, they end up taking longer than others, especially in online games, such as Fortnite.
With that in mind, the team made some decisions to make this screen more useful and even more fun. It made it more useful with the presence of important gameplay tips, like the one in the image above, and even security messages, such as the one that says that the Epic Games team will never ask for the user’s password.
Another thing they did as well and which is one of my favorites is the option to change the image of that screen. In the battle pass and other game events, the player is usually presented with some different images for the loading screen, such as images of the season itself or images of some special events such as Marvel events that happen in the game, making the experience much more fun and with small strategies.
And much more!
The Fortnite UX team has done an outstanding job over these years, since before the game’s launch and beyond. In addition to these strategies I mentioned here, there are a few more that will be left for another post, such as feedback signals when hitting a target, building, etc. accessibility, and the game lobby among other things.
Can you remember any cool UX Design strategies in Fortnite or any other game?
Take a look at my case study for a Fortnite Companion App
