Antegods is a twin stick shooter developed by game developer Codeglue that takes inspiration from the moba genre but keeps it simple to pick up and play. When I was working on the project it was known as Glitchforce 1 and had a different theme and artstyle.

The challenge for me at the time was twofold. I was tasked with designing the whole menu structure outside of the game, in particular the monetization aspects, and design all the in-game UI elements. This ranged from ideation and early prototyping in wireframes through to visual design.

When you run out of health in the game, you start to fall and crash into the ground. An enemy player has to come close to you and finish you off. If they didn’t do this, you get up again after a brief recovery period.

In a user testing session I found out that people typically try to stay as far away from each other as possible since it gives you more time to dodge incoming fire. The problem that occurred was that when players keep a large enough distance they are effectively shooting at enemies off-screen. What happened was that a player hits an enemy outside of their screen, they would go down but the player would never really notice and just keep firing. The enemy would get back up again with most of their health and they would wonder what happened.

After that test I designed a small indicator that shows up at the edge of the screen that notifies a player that an enemy is falling down. This indicator only shows up if an enemy is falling down and is outside of the screen. These optimizations are based on a way of working I discuss in my thesis on dynamic user interfaces as well as in my Gamasutra article on the same topic here

The end result of this small change is that players now move in for the kill which is the desired behavior. You can see an example of the indicator in the movie at the top of this case study.