Building an Interactive Game Experience

What is Proxy?

Proxy is a Web3 company focused digital currencies. A brand new venture developing technology to integrate and encrypt digital assets and securities into one personal digital wallet, so as to provide convenience of access as well as assurance of privacy protection of personal data from private entities.

My Role

Proxy was looking for a service that would provide users with an incentivized opportunity to use their acquired for exciting narrative moments on. Their struggle was generating widespread adoption of a groundbreaking technology, so it was important to design an entire system that would provide key interaction moments for players while fully leveraging their digital wallet.

My role was to build an incentivized game system for purchasing, building, trading, and maintaining an array of digital currencies and assets.

Creating Structure

It was first necessary to define the general interactive structure that would propel this experience forward. Through collaboration with Proxy leadership, as well as fellow designers, we landed on 3 core pillars.

Core Pillars:

1. Throughout the interactive experience, key decision making moments will be presented to the player that may influence the narrative moving forward.
2. Key decisions will be made either through or in tandem with various digital assets. These will carry various attributes that define its use and purpose within this experience, and will be synced with the player’s Proxy Wallet.
3. Choices made inside the game may influence the story either on an individual or community wide scale.
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The greatest challenge was making sure to balance gameplay mechanics with handcrafted storytelling. It was important to allow the story to be the driving force behind the experience, and simply leverage a players digital Proxy wallet to empower key roleplaying moments that would move the story forward.

Defining an Asset

The next major step was defining the key characteristics that could be identified with individual assets. It was important to assign these traits to both Proxy 1st party digital assets and 3rd party assets, and define them in ways relevant from a gameplay, storytelling, and economic standpoint. As such, we defined 3 core parent traits, with various characteristics and qualities defined under each parent trait:

• Experience: This defines how much an asset has been used within the game, and it's relative growth. Each Tier has 5 levels, and each subsequent tier unlocks increasing features and enhancements that can better serve the player. An important business requirement is that only Proxy 1st party digital assets will grow in experience.
• Attributes: These features define the physical description of the asset, as well as it's use case. As different assets can accomplish different tasks, categorizing each becomes important. Another important feature is the asset's history, as different assets can be traded amongst players as digital currency through the Proxy app. Each time an action is taken with a relevant digital asset, it's usage is recorded for future reference to players, and may become an important qualifying characteristic in the story moving forward.
• Value: As these digital assets function from an economic standpoint, it's value can be ascertained based on both its primary real world starting value, as well as it's growing value as it is used in-game.

Design System Expansion

To coexist alongside the rest of Proxy’s digital identity means to leverage as much of the pre-existing design system, while building components that will be used exclusively with the new “Proxy Collective” system. The most prominent features cover 2 aspects; Measuring game progress, and digital wallet integration.

The ability to track and measure game progress across available story content was cited as important so users knew what to expect to complete a single "session" of story, as well as progress through long term play. As such, a custom progress bar was created. Each dot represented completed or uncompleted scenes in a chapter, that would then expand into a progress bar to indicate completion status of a single scene.

Digital wallet integration required a balance of offering information relevant for the game and in parallel with the user's wallet app, while ensuring information is not overloaded on top of the main experience. As such, a wallet sidebar was created that would detail relevant "equipped" assets, their level progress, and provide a pullout inventory button that would give an expanded view of what is available to the user.

Visual Look

It was important to ensure that the UI would not overpower any particular scene throughout the gameplay, and make sure it was present only in a "need-to" capacity. This is why the asset tray takes up little visual focus, so as to ensure focus and maintained on the visual novel and storytelling aspects of the game.

Mockups of key functions and moments throughout the experience were created in parallel with the Design System Expansion to gain alignment on the general concepts. During this phase, early collaboration with the development team was critical to ensure all interaction concepts were feasible, as well as properly scalable between desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Prototyping Interactions

Once alignment was achieved on the mockups, the final stage was to create a "Vertical Slice" of the experience. This prototype featured every possible interaction in a demo, while taking the user through a typical "Chapter" that they would experience in the game. The focus on motion is dedicated to enhancing in-between moments of scenes, and maintains a feeling of a cyberpunk-esque hacking sequence. This way, the player feels an enhanced sense that they are gaining control over the story.