Rust - Server Info Redesign
• Independent Project
• UX/UI Design
• Adobe XD
Overview.
Rust is one of my favorite games that has gained a lot of traction since I started playing it in beta. However, it has become somewhat notorious as a hardcore game that is unforgiving to new players. Therefore, I decided to make the initial menu screen more accessible to new players, and facilitate the players finding servers that match their desired type of experience.
Analysis.
Rust has evolved as a game over the last several years, adding and removing systems to optimize their gameplay. They have also added a lot of mods that allow server owners to customize the Rust experience. Players can choose to play on the hardcore “Vanilla” servers, some of which are run by Facepunch Studios themselves. Or players can choose to play on more casual modded servers that allow for higher gather rates, disallow PvP, or insert special enemies and/or events.
With so many options for players to choose from, new hurdles arise. New players are faced with a list of servers using game jargon that means very little to those players who are not familiar with the terminology. While the menu is aesthetically sound, there are usability hurdles for new players that I would like to address.
Research
To get a sense of what is common amongst survival games, I took a look at 3 other survival games, and 1 MOBA to get a sense of what the landscape of server/game selection looks like.
Minecraft was an obvious choice for the research. What I found in looking at their server selection menu, there is a list of popular or curated servers to browse through. One thing I noticed is that a majority of players use the “Direct Connect” feature to simply join the server they want to play. While this may be fine for players that have an understanding of Minecraft and are part of minecraft communities, this does not help those who have no idea of what sort of server they would like to join. There are very non-specific descriptions on many of the servers. There is also no way to tell new users if a server is a creative or survival server (or even what those words mean.)
7 Days to Die is a lower budget and less graphically intensive game. The server list gets a bit more descriptive than Minecraft did, but it still doesn’t give the user any idea as to what survival mode or otherwise means.
The Forest is another survival game that has very little context to the servers that are listed. In order to add a description to a server, the host seems to need to add it into the title which is not the best for usability.
This is the UI for the “Play” menu in League of Legends. Seeing this gave me an idea of how to model the new design for the Rust main menu. Drawing inspiration from how each type of game mode has an icon and a description. It makes it clear what each mode is, however, the sub categories are not defined (Blind Pick, Draft Pick, etc..).
For reference, this is the current Rust server list. As someone who knows Rust, I am able to tell what mods and settings are available on each server. However, it is not good practice to assume new players know the jargon of this game.
Proposed Solution
After several sketches to get the idea across, I began to create a low fidelity prototype in Adobe XD
