Hill Climb Racing is a mobile gaming classic that has over 1 billion downloads on the Google play store.
A welcome redesign
When I started working at Fingersoft, my job was to start rethinking the user interface and menu structure of Hill Climb Racing.
Hill Climb Racing is a 12-year-old mobile game and its age – as well as the weight of new features added along the way – had started to show. As someone new to the game, it was clear to me from the beginning that there were many things that could be improved on and I still get excited when I think about all of the little improvements that could be made and the impact they could have considering the large amount of users the game has.
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(Fig. 1) A comparison of the settings menu in the redesign (top) and the original game (bottom).
Initial thinking
I started work by talking to people in the company and by familiarizing myself with the game.
Talking to people in and outside of the Hill Climb Racing team gave me plenty of insight into what was and wasn't working about the game from their perspective. I got to know the game a little bit better simply by playing it and by creating a sitemap to get a better sense of what went where. At the same time, I wrote down any issues that jumped out at me as potential points of improvement. Afterwards, I had a pretty good sense of what I thought were the most glaring issues in the UI.
Remote user testing via PlaytestCloud
Early on I conducted user testing through PlaytestCloud, a service for remote testing primarily for the game industry.
While watching the playtesting videos, I noted down issues the players faced and ranked them by how often a particular issue would come up (Fig. 2).
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(Fig. 2) The playtesting notes looked a bit like this. Nothing special, but illuminating nonetheless.
Many of the issues that came up in testing were issues that I had already recognized while going through the game earlier, but many were not. The most prominent issues had nothing to do with the UI:
- A particular game mode meant for more advanced players was available from the start and quite prominently featured in the UI. This lead to frustration as almost all of the testers would inevitably end up playing it with zero chance for any kind of progress.
- For a number of players, the game was initially too challenging. My guess is that this has to do with the fact that you can't really get anywhere in the game without upgrading your vehicle first. It was kind of hard to get early wins in the short amount of time the playtesters spent with the game (15–30 minutes).
- Many players would have wanted some kind of help or instruction with the how the game works.
I thought all of the above issues could be addressed with relatively minor changes to the game. For various reasons though, many of these more general points went unaddressed as the project moved forward.
Hill Climb Racing Lite
Somewhere along the way, what began as a UI revamp of the mobile game became Hill Climb Racing Lite, a browser based version of the game.
This pivot came with some changes:
- Hill Climb Racing Lite was planned with much less content compared to the mobile version of the game.
- Fairly early on it was decided that the game needed to work in portrait orientation, which meant that the UI had to be able to adapt to this new screen ratio.
- The file size of Hill Climb Racing Lite had to be much smaller than the original game. Something like 5 megabytes compared to the ~173 megabytes of the original.
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(Fig.3 ) Screenshot of Poki.
Figure 3 above shows just some of the games available on Poki, a popular website for browser games. Playing the games on Poki made me realize how different the browser gaming space was from mobile games. I guess it has been this way since the early days of Flash, but it still struck me how disposable the games felt. It was fast and easy to jump from game to game and my commitment to any one game was very low. I felt like this had implications for the redesign as well.
With these new considerations in mind I went on to create new wireframes, a prototype and – eventually – high fidelity designs along with the final assets.
Looking back
Thinking through the project today, there are two things I think I should have done differently: I should have spent less time on design exploration and more time on interaction design.
Additionally, there are a couple of things I have been thinking about a lot after the project:
- Since I worked as a freelancer, I didn't get to see the project through to the end. This is unfortunate because when I look at the released product now, I see many imperfections that I would very much like to iron out.
- The project was only a partial redesign: a combination of new and old assets. I think a complete overhaul of the graphics could have produced better results. The stripped down content of Hill Climb Racing Lite and the relatively low amount of graphical assets mean that the additional workload would not have been too much of an issue. This is just my opinion, of course.
At the end of the day, I can't help but feel the project didn't quite reach its full potential. Nevertheless, I'm grateful for the opportunity and I'm happy that I got to learn more about the ins and outs of game development at Fingersoft.