Creator Spotlight : Meagan Leflar

Today, we chat with Meagan Leflar, Lead UI/UX! She led the UI/UX team, which was a crucial aspect of the game in regards to our player-plattering design philosophy!

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey that brought you to work on Hell is Us?

Like many, my journey with video games started young. I fondly remember sitting on my grandparents’ living room floor playing Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past on their Super Nintendo, and many weekend mornings playing N64 and PS2 games in the basement with my brother when we were growing up.

As a video game creator, my journey into video games started at Carleton University. For the final project of my bachelor's degree in Information Technology, I worked with a team of brilliant women to create a game that used a Brain-Computer Interface. Yes, it was a video game that you could control with your mind! The Emotiv EEG headset that we used could also track the user’s emotional state and could read facial expressions. For example, you could move pillars with your mind to solve puzzles, and we had a cute side-quest that was triggered by winking at a mermaid.

This led me to dig deeper into player motivations and user-centered design, earning my master's degree in Human Computer Interaction, along with some minor publications. Once I emerged from academia, I worked as a game programmer on assorted small projects for companies including Hasbro, Warner Brothers, and Disney.

I got my in at Rogue Factor as a generalist programmer at the tail end of Mordheim: City of the Damned, almost 10 years ago now. They joked that they took me on because I was passionate about working on User Interfaces, and no other programmer on the team wanted to do it. And passionate about working on User Interfaces, I was (and still am)! I spent years learning and absorbing all I could, and championing UX within the team, and was eventually promoted to Lead UI/UX in time to tackle the player-plattering challenges of Hell is Us!

One of the core pillars of the design of Hell is Us is player-plattering, (no maps, no quest markers, minimal information) etc. Which, of course, means reduces any artificial information on-screen. As UI/UX designer, what were the challenges that you faced?

Game UX Design differs from standard UX Design in that with games you need to deliberately allow certain friction in the experience to create the “fun”. In an application used for health care, for example, you want to completely reduce friction and user error. However, in the context of games, lack of challenge can create boredom. Part of our work in developing this player-plattering approach was to make those deliberate decisions about what support to offer the player and what to leave out, when and why.

To this end, we spent time prototyping and evaluating what tools we did want to give the player to track their quests and progress through the game world and story. While we wanted the player to use their own critical thinking and observation skills to solve the puzzles and complete quests, we still wanted players to be able to stop playing the game for a while and pick it up again later without being lost. This process ultimately led to the development of the Investigation screen in the Datapad, which allows players to track the main story by displaying information that Remi has gathered in a mind-map chart.

Playtesting was also an important part of the