Cuisineer is a brilliant mix of simulation and action dungeon-crawling from Battelbrew production. You can furnish and manage a restaurant before serving customers, go through dungeons slaying monsters to get new ingredients to keep the restaurant going, and in between those phases, interact with the village to complete quests or improve your equipment or restaurant.
The UX research performed on Cuisineer was completely improvised as a reaction to the first experience with the game of a few friends when the game was released. They reported some confusing points. As an aspiring GUX researcher, I decided to dig a bit deeper into it.
Through observation of unmoderated play sessions and meta-review of community feedback, I could identify a few shortcomings as well as related recommendations to report and communicate to the development team.
Preliminary usability research
Since the game just came out, I decided that the research would focus on the first few hours of the game, and ensure that the player understands how to interact with the game. I had quite a dozen hours in the game already, so I started a new save to re-experience the first steps into the game. I took note of all the parts where I remember struggling and paid attention if any UI elements could help the player. To name a few assumptions that came out from this usability research:
Instruction & quest generally speaking lacked information
Restaurant management is easily understood
The brewery shop in town is not understood
The following research focused on observing players with those assumptions in mind to confirm or disprove them.
Research Method
The goal of the research was to evaluate if the players understood the game and what was asked of them. With that in mind, and the low resources I had at my disposal, I decided to base the research on unmoderated observation of gameplay via either volunteered participants or video footage I could find.
The selected player sample had to not be familiar with the game. They could have heard about the game and read an article about it, but it was necessary for the research integrity that the play session monitored was their first hands-on contact with the game. For video footage found online, I relied on Twitch VOD feature and YouTube to review diffusion on the days following the release. I prioritised videos where the player displayed their camera feed to be able to observe their reactions. One session could be organised in person and monitored. I asked the player to think aloud as much as possible while I was observing their gameplay without interfering.
In addition to the gameplay observation, I also went through reviews of the community on Steam forums to gather some more opinionated reviews on the game.
Reporting
The final report produced is accessible at the end of this article
The data gathered through the video and the monitored session yielded that could be categorised into three main topics:
Usability of the recipes: the clear majority of the players expressed confusion when faced with new recipes and how to cook them
Clarity & instructions: Quests and instructions were sometimes unclear or misunderstood by the players
Accessibility & quality of life: changes that the players expected, or could improve their experience, with a reminder for the accessibility guidelines.
With each issue, I tried to propose a reasonable solution that could be implemented without needing an overhaul of the game. While the first category was fairly straightforward, the two others are more generic and regroup several observations that seemed important enough to be reported. While each of these points could have been subject to a section in and of itself, I decided to regroup the important points without bloating the report with information.
To convey the importance of each of these topics, they were labelled with a severity label. In the case of this research, the highest severity reported was "medium" and meant to be an issue that should be addressed but does not break the game or disrupt the experience.
Takeaways
The studio was positively surprised and reported that some of the points presented would be accounted for. Additionally, I asked a former mentor to give me feedback on the produced report to have an idea of what I could improve in future reports. the key points I noted were:
To use my experience with research than my experience with games as proof of credibility.
Give a scale for the severity, with a short explanation of the label.
Conclusion
This research was an opportunity for me to further practice UX research after my graduation and to support the efforts of the development team. While the research was pretty much improvised, I believe that the points reported raised some relevant questions and issues with the game.