We Like Trophies

When Oddly Studios were approached by the good people at Sony Computer Entertainment of America to work on the in-game trophy system used in all SCEA game titles, it was a bit of a dream job for us. You see, we’re gamers at the studio. We play them, make them, talk about them, and big chunk of our social networks revolve around them. Having a chance to contribute to the premium brand was terribly exciting for us – so exciting we had to tell friends about it.

So we brought in our friends from top design studio Savory Projects.
The people at Savory are not only creative geniuses, they’re gamers like us. They were perfect to collaborate with.

Knowing the Gamers

We started with sketches and a lot of conversation about what the trophy system means to gamers. What is it that people love about trophies? What do they wish would change? We scoured blogs, forums, brought in people we knew were game enthusiasts and polled them.

Gamers are Not Just Gamers

Out of this, we got the insight that gamers are not just gamers – they’re into lots of different things. So we started pulling from some of those other influences in our designs, seeing the in-game trophy system as more of a social exercise than just a mechanism for bragging rights. True, there is some bragging involved of course. But the trophy system can be so much more than that – a way to keep up to speed with what your friends are doing, what they are using their time on, what they’re involved with.

We also pictured being able to arrange tournaments and challenges in the revised trophy system. Eventually, the system would evolve into something that could relate with all aspects of the user’s life, from their social communities to the way they schedule their free time.

Developing The API

Developing an API is no small task, and when the amount of data is as extensive as the in-game trophy system for a major company like Sony, working in an agile manner becomes crucial. With many legacy systems in place, we needed to figure out a way to show what we were thinking of and get people actually playing around with the concept, while using meaningful data. Otherwise, we might design an API that would end up being impractical to implement on a large scale.

To accomplish this, we created interfaces between the legacy systems and our prototype code. We were able to create a system that would allow parts of the existing profile page to be overwritten with our re-designed elements without actually affecting the back-end systems at all. This opened up our creative freedom, allowing us to express the concepts we envisioned in a way that let the stakeholders actually try them out with real data.

As an example, one thing we fleshed out was the filtering system. In our interviews, we found that gamers would love more ways of visualizing their achievements. With this in mind, we hooked up interface elements in our prototypes that allowed the actual trophy record of a user to be be sorted by things like most time spent playing, highest number of trophies in a category.
We also worked on comparisons. Gamers should be able to play with the numbers the same way sports fans do. For instance, how many of your friends would it take combined to match the records of a top gamer? How much time would you likely spend to match their records in a single game?

In cases where the data existed, we used it. In cases where it was not yet being tracked, we used fake data. The goal was to show what could be possible and let the client decide what would be practical. We took the gloves off, so to speak, and followed where passion took us.