Personal Project: Age of Sigmar – Path to Glory Warband Manager…

In 2021 Games Workshop published the 3rd edition of its tabletop game “Warhammer: Age of Sigmar”.

This edition was the first to include a narrative play mode known as “Path to Glory”, allowing players to link their games into continuous campaigns and develop their heroes and warbands with new abilities and territories.

This mode of play has been slowly gaining in popularity and I chose this as the subject of my first UX project – to develop an app to ease the warband management aspect of the game.

Create a prototype of a prospective app to allow players of the Path to Glory game mode to manage their warbands in an easy and fun way. The goal of this is to encourage more engagement from the player-sphere for this type of gameplay and increasing satisfaction and fun for all.

As this is a game focussed project, the aim is to develop a product that will be both useful and intuitive, along with helping to increase the potential for fun for the user.

I wanted the app to be interactive, helping to guide the user through the stages of creating their warband list – rather than just being a neutral list building tool.

This is supposed to be a friendly design, with helpful hints to assist a person who is new to the Path to Glory game experience. These hints should be removable for those who already know the system – I don’t want these users to be frustrated.

Looking at Stephen Anderson's UX Hierarchy of Needs, I wanted this product to achieve Phase 1 and 2 at the least, to remove frustrations and provide some elements of surprise and delight for users.

Currently there are three major competitor apps on the market (Google Play Store)

1) Free to use app Battlescribe

2) Games Workshop's own Warhammer Age of Sigmar The App - requires paid subscription to use

3) Games Workshop's free to use Warscroll Builder app - only available on the company website, not for download

4) Goonhammer.com's free to use website app Administatum

However, only one of these apps are designed to help with the Path to Glory Narrative Play mode, most are rather only to assist in 'list building' for players of the Matched Play game mode or, in the case of Administratum, the management app only covers Narrative Play for the other main Games Workshop game: Warhammer 40,000.

Goonhammer.com claims there will be further expansions for this app into other games, but they are not currently available.

Battlescribe has, very recently (December '22), modified the list building function to operate with Narrative Play, however, this is still only a basic 'list building' app. There are no features to deal with the finer details of warband management (glory/territories/quests/experience).

As such, it was concluded that there are 0 Path to Glory warband manager products currently available for use.

The best current solution is for users to create spreadsheets that hold all the relevant information.

Battlescribe

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Warscroll Builder

Administratum

As a player of the game system myself, I already had some preconceptions of what I would want from this product. However, I decided that I would approach the community of players in order to begin understanding their pain-points and level of engagement with the Path to Glory (PtG) play mode.

Discord is an excellent resource for directly communicating with a huge number of players and, with a number of servers dedicated to discussions surrounding the Age of Sigmar (AoS), I was certain to quickly find subjects for both quantitative research (surveys) and qualitative research (online interviews).

I posted the survey into several servers under my Discord nickname, ambercoast.

To date I have received 15 responses.

The main questions from my survey helped to ascertain the issues that players saw with the game mode, but also whether they would actually find an app of use to them.

My surveys and interviews gave me a dataset to work with – firstly to create some User Personas and to begin empathizing with users regarding their thoughts and feelings of the PtG system.

User Personas:

Narrative Player

Only plays the narrative mode rather than the Matched Play mode because they prefer the immersion that is possible.

There is also the feeling that you can play games with non-optimized lists, something that isn't encouraged in the competitive environment of Matched Play. Main issues – Difficult to find other players, rules too spread out

Casual Player

Splits time between Matched/Open play and PtG. This player is not particularly wedded to the narrative idea and is willing to find any opponent to play, regardless of mode. Main issues - Difficult to find other players, some factions have more interesting rules, rules too spread out

Most of the opinions that were gathered, centered on the lack of balance in the game system, which doesn't fall under the remit of this project. However, there was a general feeling for all players that the rules system is spread out too much and that finding other players to play this game mode with is more difficult than for Matched Play.

The user experience mapped in a user flow chart. The process is controlled by the ‘step-by-step’ nature of the rules set. The experience maps for both new user and established user.

What was possible to conclude from this process was that there are a lot of loops required, through user decisions and app interactions. It was surprising just how many decisions are required by a player, both when constructing their initial warband, to managing it through a protracted campaign of many games.

However, the creation process is essentially linear in form, with each step already outlined in the game rule book.

Having devised the user flow diagram to follow through all the myriad steps listed in the game rulebook, I began to create some wireframes to investigate and present the overall appearance of the proposed app.

A sample of the prototype interactions that were developed.

Demonstration of the working prototype, modelled using Figma. This was a learning experience, developing the knowledge and skills to design the app which will then be shown to potential users in the community for feedback and testing.

The testing will also indicate whether I have achieved my initial goal of delivering a product that is:

Functional

Reliable

Usable

Convenient

Pleasurable

Between the wireframing and the prototype, it was decided that instead of employing some artwork on the page, rather the artwork would form a backdrop for the entire app. The artwork chosen was the original Path to Glory rule book art for the game supplement that was released in 2017. It was felt that this particular image would provide some feeling of connection for the player, from this app to the early foundations of Narrative Play within the Age of Sigmar rules set and its history.

The painting itself depicts two warriors fighting in the foreground of a mighty fantasy battle. One fighter, a daemon from the setting's alternative reality, The Warp, the other combatant a super-human Stormcast who represent the principal defenders of humanity in the setting.

With the background chosen, appropriate fonts and colours were chosen for the icons, buttons, text and forms.

Logo

App Icon

60 px X 60 px

Primary Colours

PTG Button Blue #001AFF

PTG Text Black #000000

PTG Button Text #FFFEFE

Secondary Colours

PTG Button Click #949EFC

PTG Button Hover #C0C5F3

PTG Dropdown #8793FF

When testing colours for visibility clarity and impact against the backdrop, the above colours appeared to satisfy the requirement.

The blue was chosen as the main button colour, being softer on the user's eyes than a stark white, which was rather chosen as the achromatic, non-clash option for the button text. It is very clear and legible against the blue of the buttons.

On the dropdown lists, with the colour softening to a pastel amethyst, white no longer suited so the text changes to black for maximum clarity.

Typography

Screen Heading - Bangers 48 px

Category Heading - Bangers 24 px

Roster User Data - Bangers 16 px

Button Text - Open Sans 14 px

Dropdown Option - Open Sans 12 px

Bangers font is fun to look at and stands out well on the art backdrop. It also appears clear to read.

Hierarchy being demonstrated by font size throughout.

Button text and dropdowns were made more standard with Open Sans font. This was for maximum clarity for the user when navigating and making choices on the screen.