Overview
Goals
Establish an ecosystem for localizing and publishing oversea games to China.
A unified platform for developers to manage their game branches and promotion materials. A technical support for developers to integrate their games with Netease Games community. A graphic dashboard to monitor game publishing processes.
Follow censor regulation in China. Standardize upload and localization processes to save Netease operators’ time.
Challenges
Most of our developers use Steam to publish their games that we need to learn about how to publish a game with a build pipeline.
It’s not easy to point out what kind of materials or how will they look like are available for our operators to localize games.
How this console system connect with Seadra – operator backend system and Oddish – game launcher.
Approaches
Read and learn from users’ emails to get key expetations about this console.
Design thinking process to analyse users’ behaviors and colabrate with Netease technical team to define what functions can we fulfill user’s needs.
Use Balsamiq Mockups, Sketch, After Effects, Angular to design and make a design language system which could help our frontend engineers to organize components.
Use Trello to manage this project agily.
Needs collecting
Our users are located in North America and Europe, we can only talk to them via emails. Fortunately, they provided us valuable ideas and needs. They seemed very exciting to have a unified game publish system which could cut down our communication consumptions.
Design Thinking
Concept Definitions
| Name | Definition |
| App | An App is the main representation of a product on ODC. An App generally has its own pipeline and store page. Every app has a “main” DLC. |
| DLC | Downloadable Content (DLC) are additional content for your game that can be purchased or downloaded for free. They are normally used for soundtracks, artbooks, and extra in-game content. |
| Depot | A depot is a logical grouping of files which are all delivered to a customer as a single group. Depots are uniquely identified by a Depot ID. |
| Build | A build is the result of uploading your content to ODC, it can contain 1 or more of your depots. Builds are uploaded by developers using ODC build pipeline stepper. |
| Branch | Branches, also known as Betas, are specific builds of your application that you have made available publicly or privately through ODC. |
- According to Oddish Client design, developers follow format requirements and upload their promotion media.
- For every main game and DLC, developers can customize its page. Materials include pictures, videos and text contents.
- In-game goods are opened to edit.
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
User Interface
Design Language System
Motion Design
I use After Effects to make motion design, and they could be exported to lottie Json files which are much more smaller than gif files and they are vectors. I have written an angular demo for lottie motions, which match our develop environment.
http://store-psd-app.prototype-demo.netease.com/
Project Management
We use trello kanban to manage our projects. Each spin lasts for a week, so we conducted meetings weekly and make sure our products design efficiently.
Deliverables are include documents, design source files, design exported files and codes. We use GitLab to manage versions and Google drive to keep our exported files up to date.
Conclusions
http://odc-web.oddish.netease.com/#/welcome
It’s different to design products in internet companies from consulting firms. I care more about ownership of products, and I’ll plan more about the products and make it happened. It’s easier for me to understand business than other designers depends on my consulting experiences.
Project management is very important. I hired 2 deisnger to help me to design products so that I could be more focus on user needs and product goals. A well-coordinated daily work can always boost our job. Shared files, open minded talks, and organized guide make our team stay passionated.
Sadly, it’s very hard for our games to get censored these 2 years, espesially overseas ones. Now we only have 2 games approved to be published. However I won’t stop designing and optimizing it, it’s not only about ownership but also an innovation product in china game industry.