This continues my previous blog post, which you can find link. The third part is here.
I’d like to start by talking about empathy.
Empathetic design
I’m a strong supporter of user-centred design in games. After all, we’re making products for people to enjoy. Clash Royale offers many examples of this approach.
Empathetic design has many benefits. When you take care of players, they respond with loyalty. That can improve retention and, in turn, conversion into paying users.
It also has a long-term effect. A player who leaves with negative feelings is less likely to return. Someone who leaves with positive memories may come back to try an update. Those memories also make it easier to convince them to try your next game.
Acquiring players for mobile games is expensive. Once we’ve brought someone into our game, their wellbeing should be a priority.
A few points we’ve already covered are particularly important for user-centred design:
Thoughtful notifications. Players know what they want to do. Don’t force them to spend their precious time on something else.
A minimal shop with clear item descriptions. Most players don’t spend money—the rough figure discussed here is about 5% paying—but those who do want a good experience. Make the shop frustrating, and they may stop visiting it.
Portrait mode makes one-handed interaction easier. Mobile games need to work while people are on the move. Many players don’t want to sit down and give a game all their attention.
Interactions
People have different habits when interacting with a UI, and changing those habits is difficult. Where possible, an interface should support more than one way to do the same thing. It takes more time and thought, but it can work for more players. Clash Royale’s developers considered this and offered several interaction options.
Gameplay gives us a clear example. Clash Royale is about placing cards on the battlefield, and the developers give us two ways to do it:
Drag and drop: drag a card from the bottom of the UI to its destination.
Tap and tap: tap a card to select it, then tap the battlefield to place it.
The main menu also offers alternatives. We can donate cards in two ways:
Tap the “Donate” button.
Tap the card image on a donation request, or hold it to donate several cards.
Menu navigation:
Swipe left or right to change the view.
Tap an icon at the bottom to change the view.
Chest opening has two modes too: slow and fast. It’s a small improvement, but after opening more than a hundred chests, it saves a lot of time and frustration.
User Interface
Tooltips
Clash Royale uses tooltips where something might be unclear, so players can learn through interaction. The info button always looks the same, making its meaning easy to learn. Minimal interfaces sometimes need these little guides. There’s a fine balance between too little information and too much. Tooltips give us a bit more room to find that balance.
Economy
The game’s economy uses two currencies: soft and premium. That’s less confusing than the four currencies found in some games. One currency might be simplest for players, but a dual-currency system has advantages in free-to-play games. It gives developers more control over the economy. When that control fails, prices can rise rapidly and players can accumulate too many items. At a broad level, a game economy resembles a real one.
Back to empathetic design: it’s easy to forget the player’s perspective. Introducing four or more currencies makes their relationships harder to understand. Adding ten shop categories to accommodate them doesn’t help either.
Overcomplicating this can hurt both revenue and user experience.
Gameplay
Gameplay is what games are all about. It’s where players spend most of their time, so the experience here defines the game.
Gameplay interactions
When an interaction matches expectations, players don’t have to think about it. When it doesn’t, they might complain about a broken game or horrible gameplay, even if the real problem lies elsewhere. Player feedback is valuable, but someone needs to interpret it and find the underlying issue.
Clash Royale’s developers make gameplay clear by limiting distractions and providing the information players need. Some key examples are:
Spell ranges shown in red or blue, depending on the team.
Clear deployment areas. Some units can be placed on the enemy’s side.
Deployment times that vary between units.
Damage effects showing when units hit an enemy.
Effects showing statuses such as freeze or poison.
Different visual cues.
I want to stress how important consistent interactions are. Players build habits as they read information and act on it. Consistency lets them develop mastery, become immersed and enter a flow state more easily. In a real-time competitive game, interactions can decide whether you win or lose. Their importance should be clear.
Why placement matters
Clash Royale is about timing, positioning and resolving small skirmishes across the battlefield. Each unit has its own deployment delay, and some can be placed on the enemy’s side. The battlefield also has a grid of equal tiles, and units snap to it when placed. Position matters because it affects what a unit targets: a tower, a building or a group of enemies.
The grid improves the experience in a big way. It gives players a clear way to understand units. A description can specify an attack range—for example, five tiles for an Archer—and players can quickly judge distance in the heat of battle. Without a grid and a shared measurement, that would be much harder in real time.
Different deployment areas.
Tutorial
Tutorials are often one of the most overlooked parts of a game, yet they’re crucial to engaging players in the first few minutes. Poor tutorial UX can lose a substantial share of the audience before they’ve really started playing.
Clash Royale throws you straight into the arena and asks you to defeat an opponent. It doesn’t treat players like idiots. It suggests what to do without restricting your movement, so you still have room to experiment. It doesn’t break the game’s flow by forcing every action.
The tutorial continues after the battle, much like normal play with a few guides. It only restricts you when you upgrade a card for the first time. That part could be better, but the key goal is to engage the player quickly. Getting into the arena within seconds does that well. The first few matches are against AI and may be tailored, though that’s hard to confirm without knowing the implementation. After seven wins, players can enter PvP battles. They get a chance to learn before facing other people.
Guides in the tutorial.
Player Communication
Toxicity is a common problem in online games, including League of Legends, MMORPGs and mobile games. By leaving out global chat and limiting arena communication to predefined emotes and messages, Supercell cuts out many opportunities for abuse. Clan chat is still open, but players have more control over their own group.
I’m personally in favour of limiting verbal and text interactions in games. I prefer communication through gameplay. Journey, by thatgamecompany, is a good example. Asking players to interpret signs and emotes lets them build their own way of communicating, and that can be more positive.
Many people play mobile games to relax. For them, some Clash Royale emotes can provoke negative feelings. They aren’t offensive, but players often dislike certain ones, especially the laughing emote. In the community, many asked for a permanent mute option. The developers replied that interaction was part of the experience. It’s hard to judge whether they were right. I’m personally torn.
In-game communication.
That’s not the end. The next and final part looks at the technical side and the art. Stay tuned!