What's the best way to design UX for games with multiple endings?

1 Define your goals

Before you start creating different endings for your game, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with them. What are the main themes and messages of your game? How do you want your players to feel and think after finishing it? How do you want to reward or challenge their choices and actions? How do you balance the trade-offs between complexity, consistency, and accessibility? Having a solid design document that outlines your goals and criteria for your endings will help you stay focused and avoid scope creep.

2 Design your branching

The next step is to design the structure and logic of your branching narrative. How many endings do you want to have, and how different are they from each other? How do you divide your game into chapters, scenes, or acts, and how do they affect the endings? How do you track and store the player's decisions and consequences? How do you handle branching points, checkpoints, and save systems? You can use tools like Twine, Ink, or Articy:Draft to create interactive diagrams or flowcharts that visualize your branching and help you test and debug it.

3 Communicate your feedback

One of the most important aspects of UX design for games with multiple endings is to provide clear and meaningful feedback to your players. Feedback is the information that the game gives to the player to indicate the results of their actions, the state of the game world, and the progress towards the endings. Feedback can be delivered through various channels, such as dialogue, narration, sound, music, animation, UI, or gameplay mechanics. Feedback should be consistent, relevant, and timely, and it should help the player understand the impact and implications of their choices.

4 Optimize your content

Another challenge of UX design for games with multiple endings is to optimize the amount and quality of your content. Content is the actual text, audio, video, or graphics that make up your game's story and presentation. Content should be engaging, immersive, and diverse, and it should reflect the tone and style of your game. However, content can also be costly, time-consuming, and difficult to manage, especially when you have multiple endings that require different or additional content. You need to find ways to optimize your content production and delivery, such as reusing, repurposing, or modularizing your content, or using procedural or adaptive techniques.

5 Test your usability

The final step of UX design for games with multiple endings is to test the usability of your game. Usability is the measure of how easy and enjoyable it is for your players to interact with your game and achieve their goals. Usability testing involves observing and evaluating how real players play your game, and collecting feedback and data on their behavior, preferences, and satisfaction. Usability testing can help you identify and fix any issues or problems with your game's functionality, performance, accessibility, or user interface, and it can also help you validate or improve your game's narrative, feedback, and content.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?