Talent Pun

Marvel Contest of Champions

¶ UI and UX Design
¶ 2015 to 2021

MCOC UI/UX Team: Ellie Moon, Elaine Teh, Talent Pun, Scott Lindsay, Christian Macachor, Stefan Dalen

I was fortunate enough to join the Kabam in 2015, as a UX/UI designer during the second year Marvel Contest of Champions, which I continued to work on, on-and-off , for six years.

Over the course of my run at Kabam, I worked on a variety of features, large and small: Portals, Summoner Sigil (their Premium Pass), Dungeons, Quick Chat, Difficulty Selection, Monthly Payment Cards and a couple of major features that were never released.

My role and responsibilities on MCOC included:

• workshopping user journeys

• producing user flows, wireframes and mocks

• creating and producing UIassets

• providing implementation and polish support in Unity

• planning and conducting usability tests

Contest was my introduction to the world of free-to-play mobile games, and I’ll always be grateful for everything I learned there.

PORTALS

‘Portals’ were introduced to the game in its third year, as an overall initiative to give the Quest Designers more tools and flexibility when designing maps. Portals allow players to enter and exit paths from multiple locations.

The use of Portals allowed the designers to give players strategic choices when playing cooperatively; and create solo content that demanding more thoughtful planning and problem solving. It also meant designers could create maps with varying levels of difficulty, and events with randomized content and rewards.

SUMMONER SIGIL & MONTHLY PAYMENT CARD

Part of the challenge for the design team has always been develops a offering that were enticing to players, but didn’t cannibalize the rewards or incentives to engage in existing content. We wanted players to pay-to-progress, but not pay-to-win. As a result, we were happy to trade monetary value if if an offer increased long term engagement.

The Summoner Sigil was Contests version of a Premium Pass or VIP feature. Players can only gain the full value of the Pass with ordinary effort, but it still required them to play on a semi-regular basis.

From a UX experience perspective, the challenge was communicating the value proposition; particularly for new users unfamiliar with the games employee. I championed two initiatives in this regard:

• An automatic free trial week for new users; where the players would feel the impact of the Sigil; and than to be offered to purchase the access at the end of the week.

• Anchoring the Sigil against other Hard currency offers in the store, so players understood the added value of the Monthly Daily Card and Sigil compared to one-off purchases

The Sigil itself managed to hit our projected subscriber goal in three days.

DUNGEONS

One of the few new modes added to Contest in the past three years, Dungeons (now called Incursions) is a two-player co-op mode, intended to serve as a less hardcore alternative to Alliance Quests and Alliance Wars — two large-scale, socially demanding competitive modes that required the full participation of a 30-player guild/team.

Essentially the Contest equivalent of a pick-up game, Dungeon participants can pair up with friends or use matchmaking to play a two-player map, with procedurally generated levels. Players coordinate to remove buffs from their enemies; add buffs to their own team, and can play for as long or as short as they want.

Dungeons was the impetus to improve communication features in the game in general, with the introduction of Quick Chat so players from different regions could easily communicate with each other, and later a pinging system.