Satisfactory
Satisfactory is a first-person open-world factory building game with a dash of exploration and combat. Play alone or with friends, explore an alien planet, create multi-story factories, and enter conveyor belt heaven!
Company: Fishlabs GmbH. Role: Senior UI/UX Artist
What was the project?
This projects goal was to successfully port the existing PC game Satisfactory over to PS5 and Xbox Series X. This was a high-level UX challenge unlike any I’ve faced before as I had only worked on creating the game, not taking something that was already well into production and transfer it onto a new platform – especially when the original made use of the many buttons and shortcuts that a keyboard has to offer and the intuitive interactions with the mouse!
Taking the keyboard and mouse interactions and refining them onto the two controller types was no simple task. What was at the forefront of my mind was that the button mapping should be intuitive to the players but also that the experience existing desktop players had should translate as comfortably as possible over to the console in as fluid a way as possible.
What made my life easier was working directly with Unreal Engine and being able to map out the controller functions myself and test them in temporary versions of the game, thus allowing me to trial the various solutions before handing them over to the larger team.
My role responsibilities
- UX designer focusing on mapping
- Defining solutions through mockups, interactive demos, and presentations
- Championing design decisions and solutions to the larger team
- Playtesting weekly with a focus on the latest solutions
- Working in sprints ahead of the team so as not to form a bottleneck
