OUR QUEST

To create a streamlined music app to help facilitate immersive tabletop gaming sessions.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

There are a lot of moving pieces during tabletop gaming sessions. For Dungeon Masters, this can mean managing a grid system, facilitating combat, doling out loot, providing the backbone of story, remembering weird character voices, passing notes, and playing music.

Imagine the following: you and your party have chased down the Goblin King and have nearly brought him down. You declare, "I charge at the Goblin King and brandish my broadsword in attack. I roll a 14." The music in the background rises to a crescendo as the drums of war ring out. The table anxiously awaits the DM's ruling - will the attack hit, miss, or perhaps slay the Goblin King altogether? Then, the music stops abruptly. The DM, now flustered, quickly unlocks their phone and restarts the song. But by now it's too late, your immersion has been interrupted, and while your hit does slay the Goblin King, your shining moment had all the wind knocked out of its sails.

Research

We wanted to be sure that we were starting off with our players in mind. I first built proto-personas based off of my past experiences at different game tables, and then conducted persona interviews. These interviews were conducted both in person and over video chat, and aimed to get a better understanding of who the players are, both on and off the table.

Then, using an affinity diagram, I grouped together our findings by similarity of resources currently used in-game, desires at the table, pain points during games, and the methods players currently use to enhance their gaming experiences.

From this process, we found that there were a couple different types of users we would be designing for:

Dungeoneer Rolf

26 years old
Has played D&D since college
Enjoys teaching new players
While he started off enjoying the stats and combat mechanics of roleplaying games, he now gravitates more towards the roleplaying and theater of the mind aspects. 
Began running tabletop games (DM or similar) shortly after he started as a player

Likes

Rolf doesn't mind when his players go off the rails - in fact, he enjoys it. Rather than a more structured campaign, he is more apt to run games that are more spontaneous and open-world. This means keeping a few important pieces of information written down, such as locations, world events, characters, and balanced monster encounters. With those tools, he feels confident that he can build a fun gaming experience together with the players. 

Dislikes 

Rolf does not like to see phones at the gaming table because they can be distracting and ruin game immersion. When players are on Facebook or checking Reddit, Rolf feels that he has not done a good job keeping their interest. He feels that, even though there are gaming-related mobile apps out there, the temptation to browse the internet is too strong and would prefer his players to use pen and paper. He is not opposed to technology at the table in general, but he finds most mobile apps to be clunky and more work than they're worth. 

Forgetful Frank
20 years old
Started playing D&D about a few months ago
Enjoys being nerdy with his friends and the ritual of game night
Would rather spend an hour drawing his character than sorting through stat blocks
Has not run a game before but might be interested if he could remember all the rules

Likes

Frank likes when he gets his time to shine and show off a nuanced character that he's built. He lives for the epic moments at the table of narrowly escaping death, shocking betrayal, and of course the endless quest for loot. He also likes to help facilitate game night by providing themed snacks and drinks, and setting the mood with music. 

Dislikes 

Frank isn't someone who focuses too heavily on the rules. Besides the fact that he has never read through the rulebook fully, he feels that they can detract from a game session rather than enhance it. He also doesn't like waiting too long between turns - he prefers a faster paced game, and it can be frustrating to watch other players consult rulebooks and character sheets to search for moves. Frank also has a tendency to forget his own character sheet.

Music Selection Layout

To determine the most intuitive ordering of the genres and track categories in the player, I conducted card sorts.

OPEN CARD SORT

We needed to get a sense of how players mentally organized genres in terms of gameplay. For this, I assembled 20 cards that represent moods and feelings that are commonly experienced during a game session, then asked testers to sort these cards into as many or as few piles as they'd like. I also asked them to explaining their thought process while sorting the cards to gain insight into the decision making process.

With a breakdown of how the testers viewed and named the groups of mood cards, we have a better idea of which music categories would be more commonly used, and what the most expected genre organization is when compared to in-game events and emotions.

CLOSED CARD SORT

To determine correlations between genre and audio subcategory tags, I created 40 cards with names of types of instruments (e.g. strings), locations (e.g. castle), biomes (e.g. tundra), weather (e.g. cloudy), and some in-game actions (e.g. enter town). I then asked the testers to sort these cards as they saw fit within the genre groups determined by the previous open sort.

The hypothesis was that users will demonstrate patterns in how they visualize in-game actions, locations, environments, and certain instrument sounds within specific mood categories. If correlations between the above can be found, we can gain a better understanding of how players might navigate between similar tracks.

Study reflections

In the end, a smaller pool of interviewees and testers means that we don't have all the data we need to make statistically informed decisions. However, it's a starting point for making further hypothesis that we can test later on.

In addition, while the sorters were instructed to only pay attention to the card content, variation in card colors and sizes may have led to some bias in how participants sorted cards, so additional sessions will be conducted with uniform cards. 

In the closed sort, there were too many variables introduced at once to determine significant patterns. For future card sorts, I will be narrowing down the cards to smaller groups.

What we most learned from these card sorts and interviews is that players envision things very differently. One person sorted out the genre cards in almost the opposite way of the other person. Our interviews also revealed that those who play tabletop games typically come to the table with different wants, different end goals, and different reasons for playing in the first place. This is important to keep in mind when designing the app — we shouldn't be designing for one particular type of player or game, because no two players, or tables, are going to be exactly the same. We can't be prescriptive in the ways that we move forward. 

Design

Sometimes, music isn't needed for stretches of a gaming session. Instead, the quiet sounds of the natural world around the characters can be enough of a soundtrack to create an immersive experience where music might be too heavy handed or inappropriate. This is why the app has ways to add ambience to your playlists as well as music.

With the basic UI coming together, I wanted to insert some delight within the app through illustrations. Since onboarding was broken up into separate screens for selecting ambience followed by music, I developed illustrations for each music selection screen which would reflect the environment chosen in the ambience selection screen.

What's Next

As research and design iteration continues, we'll be exploring different methods for integrating audio platforms and expanding our original field recording library. Once developed into mobile or desktop MVP, we can begin the first round of usability testing. The hope is to run game sessions with the app to see how it contributes to or takes away from immersion and enjoyment and to observe ease of use. There are still many other aspects of the app to develop and research; we're just getting started, and this page will be updated with any developments.