UX/UI designer, researcher (team of 4)

Conceptual project, February 2024

QuestForge – the ultimate platform for generating Dungeons and Dragons quests, murder mystery parties, and choose-your-own-adventure experiences.

 Whether user is a seasoned game master or a novice storyteller, QuestForge them to craft immersive narratives and captivating scenarios with ease.

Storytellers and aspiring Game Masters crave intuitive tools to effortlessly create unique and engaging narrative experiences for their games. However, existing solutions are often complex, lack customization options, or fail to cater to specific genres like fantasy and sci-fi. This results in frustration, disengagement, and barriers to entry-level players.

Therefore, QuestForge needs to provide an intuitive and inspiring platform that empowers both novice and experienced storytellers to create truly memorable and personalized narrative experiences in the fantasy and sci-fi genres.

We can meet these needs by creating a website that allows users to input criteria about the themes, setting, characters, and ideas they want to incorporate into their game and using AI to generate an appropriate story.

As a result of 5 in person user interviews an 17 survey participants we concluded that the standard age range is 18 to 30 years old and they prefer to play in groups of 4 to 6 people. Most people take on both roles or prefer to just participate (not being a Dungeon Master).

Based on our research and processed data we created a user persona.

Aria is very much into gaming because she loves everything fantasy and sci-fi. She doesn't have a loot of free time to plan those games out, but she really wants to spend quality time with her friends as much as possible. 

Aria wants to try to take on a new role, Game Master, but feels intimidated because of how complex this role is. So she needs an easier and more structured way to get into being a Game Master without breaking the bank.

Main pains and gains would be the following.

Pains: 

• Story themes are too limited

• Coming up with ideas is hard and time consuming

• Characters don’t fit the story or player’s personality

Gains:

• Multiple themes to choose from

• Take characters and players into account when generating story

• Creates basic storyline to start with

We researched a couple of similar to our idea websites and discovered this:

• All websites had story and character generator

Opportunities: 

• Story sharing, social media invite and customizable party size

• Control over the narrative

The biggest opportunities would be:

• Beginner Game master starter kit

• Variety of themes and randomizer

• Inspiration board

• All-in-one toolbox

• Customize or use system-generated game component

• In-game calendar to schedule the next game

For starters we went with the simple hierarchy to make it as easy as possible for beginner players. We might add more in the future, but according to our user tests that was more then enough to get started creating their new universes!

Later down the road we decided to make slight changes, we moved DM textbook and D&D document into under the inspiration tab.

"Help" button might move to the bottom of the screen as a floating chat button, but we'll conduct A/B tests first.

The main two flows are very similar and are interchangeable, but will lead to the same ending, creating a story. 

We gave users a lot of freedom in the process of creation, because every single person we interviewed said that they prefer to have full control over the creation of a character or a story utilizing AI more like an inspirational guru rather then a sole creator.

We all created our versions of paper sketches side by side and then chose "The best of all worlds".

Our main focus was the desktop version, but we were working on mobile option at the same time.

And this is a quick sneak peak at our lo-fi prototype that we later tested and iterated based on feedback.

We went for a whimsical and fairytale-like theme because we wanted to bring our users on a magical journey with us.

A majority or our competitors' websites are done with the overwhelming amount of vintage brown and beige, black and red or simple white. We wanted to bring more interesting feel to it that could be carried on through different themes.

And the last touch was the bright orange for the pop of the color to brighten the website up and bring the most important CTA to user's attention.

This is our semi-final result. Semi because we want to add all the active pages and test it out on more targeted user group. Users have the ability to save changes after every section to make sure that nothing would get lost in the process.

Slight iteration were made, mostly about adding text boxes to all the imagery to make it more clear for users on what each section of a website could do for them.

• We initially thought our target audience was more experienced players, however, we found the newer players had more interest and use for it. 

• Creative freedom is vital to our users, so making everything customizable was important.

• Build all the remaining pages such as “Inspiration”, “Themes”, and “My Account” etc.

• Reduce the amount of scrolling, some users complained about the amount of scrolling through the page and amount of text

• Add more systems

• Create a synced calendar for organizing game schedule so people could do all the planning and communication within our website

• Kids Section: Section targeted to children - we want to include our younger audience