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Get rich or die trying

Killzone Mercenary  • UX  •  Art Direction •  Design

Killzone Mercenary is a first person shooter for the PS Vita. It's core progression mechanic is through contract killing. After winning a pitch for Guerrilla Cambridge, we were asked to build a supporting site for PS Vita’s Killzone Mercenary. Just having joined Nomads in Amsterdam and never before working for a gaming company, the first thing I did was to conduct research by playing Playstation and getting myself into the mindset of a gamer. As the core purpose of the game is to get rich we developed a concept based on treating killing as a business.

Approach

Being UX and Art lead of the project, I was responsible for a team of 2 designers. We asked ourselfes ‘what if we created a Nike+ / LinkedIn for assasins’. The site tracks and presents your every progression within the game via detailed info-graphics and chart data. You can then compare this data with friends, enemies, and any other player in the Killzone universe. You can see which weapons the very best prefer, replay their best matches and ultimately challenge them in the battlefield.

IA & User Experience

To create a very close experience to the game we took a "PS Vita" first approach and tailored the experience to the screen size of the Vita. We developed a dashboard touch interface that allowed users to quickly access their stats, see how they would perform and give them detailed data and analytics to improve their business.
Despite financial data overview and in-depth kill stats, we also developed a battle review functionality that let users analyze their battles. Users could see exactly when they where killed, by whom, on which point of the map, with which weapon and could play back all their battles over and over again to take insights and improve their game.

Design & Implementation

For the complete duration of the 5 sprint project I worked closely with a team of 6 developers creating requirements, final designs, design and interaction guidelines for the responsive system ranging from PS Vita, mobile, tablet to desktop. Based on the game UI we developed a modular system. This gave users the ability to expand and collapse information quickly. We further developed icons for leaderboards and excessive stats data.

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Credits

Creative Direction: Craig Stuart
UX Direction and Design: Duc Nguyen
Design: Dom Murphy, Sjoerd Derine
Project Management: Marc de Boer

Agency: Nomads
Client: Sony Playstation | Guerrilla Cambridge 
Development: Nomads Amsterdam