Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Animation Integration and Blending
Discuss animation system design and how animations integrate with gameplay and physics. Topics include animation state machines and transition logic, blending and layering techniques, additive animation, root motion handling, interpolation and retargeting, synchronization between animation and game state or physics, networked animation smoothing, and performance and memory trade offs for animation assets. Interviewers will look for understanding of pipeline, runtime constraints, determinism needs, and tools used to author and debug animations.
Game User Interface Systems
Comprehensive knowledge of user interface architecture and interaction systems specific to games. Covers user interface framework design and patterns, layout systems and anchoring, canvas and render ordering, and responsive layout for multiple screen sizes and platforms such as mobile, console, personal computer, and web. Includes event handling and input management for user interface elements across input sources like mouse, touch, keyboard, and gamepad; navigation and state management between screens and menus; implementation of menus and heads up display components; and how user interface communicates with and remains separated from gameplay logic. Also addresses performance considerations such as batching and pooling, animation and transition systems for interface elements, localization and accessibility for interfaces, testing and debugging user interface flows, and familiarity with common engine frameworks and tooling such as the Canvas system in Unity and the Unreal Motion Graphics system in Unreal Engine.
Player Engagement and Feedback Systems
Covers how game mechanics, feedback channels, and reward systems drive player engagement. Interviewers assess knowledge of visual audio and haptic feedback design, core loops and retention drivers, how to instrument and analyze player behavior, and methods for iterating on engagement through split testing and analytics. The scope includes designing feedback for clarity and satisfaction, integrating feedback with progression and monetization systems, and using player data to prioritize improvements.
Difficulty Balancing and Game Tuning
Principles and techniques for balancing gameplay and tuning systems so that difficulty supports player engagement. Areas to cover include exposing tuning parameters to designers creating telemetry to track player behavior using iterative playtesting and controlled experiments to validate changes designing progression and reward curves avoiding runaway power escalation and providing accessibility through optional difficulty settings or dynamic adjustment. Also discuss tooling and data pipelines that let design teams iterate quickly.
Responsive and Multi Platform Design
Covers designing user interfaces that adapt across screen sizes and platforms, including mobile, tablet, desktop, web, and native applications. Topics include responsive thinking, mobile first strategy, adaptive versus fluid layouts, responsive grids and breakpoints, component adaptation and scalability, platform specific patterns and conventions (for example iOS versus Android versus web), interaction differences for touch versus pointer devices, performance and accessibility considerations across viewports, and techniques for testing and validating layouts on varied devices. Interview assessment focuses on how candidates make layout and component tradeoffs, choose breakpoints and scaling rules, maintain visual and interaction consistency while respecting platform constraints, and communicate responsive solutions to engineers and stakeholders.
Design Collaboration and Iteration
Covers how programmers and designers work together to turn design documents into playable features and tune feel. Topics include translating design intent into code, creating rapid prototypes, exposing tweakable parameters for designers, balancing systems through iteration, collecting and interpreting playtest and telemetry feedback, prioritizing changes, and communicating trade offs with nonprogrammers. Candidates should be ready to describe collaboration practices, iteration cycles, when to prototype versus build a production system, and how to incorporate designer feedback while preserving code quality and performance.
Design Iteration and Feedback
Covers the end to end practices of gathering, evaluating, synthesizing, and incorporating feedback into iterative design and research cycles. Candidates should demonstrate how they plan and run user research and usability testing, collect feedback from users, teammates, and stakeholders, and use structured synthesis methods such as affinity mapping and thematic analysis to generate actionable insights. Includes practical iteration techniques such as rapid prototyping, playtesting, split testing and controlled experiments, incremental improvements, and versioning of design artifacts. Assesses how candidates prioritize suggested changes using impact and effort considerations, product vision alignment, and technical constraints, and how they define and measure success through quantitative metrics and qualitative signals. Examines interpersonal skills around openness to critique, responding without defensiveness, communicating trade offs and decisions to stakeholders, defending choices with evidence and rationale, documenting learnings, and establishing processes for continuous improvement and knowledge transfer. Also includes learning from past iterations and mistakes and adapting research methodology or recommendations based on new evidence.
Accessibility and Audio Feedback
Designing audio and feedback systems to support accessibility and to provide clear player cues. This includes using narration captions and haptic feedback for players with sensory impairments designing subtitle and caption systems text to speech integration audio priority and mixing so critical cues are not masked offering customizable audio and input settings and validating solutions with assistive technology and user research.
Game Balance and Difficulty Progression
Topics cover designing and tuning player facing systems so that challenge and reward scale appropriately. Candidates should be able to explain difficulty curves, parameter tuning, trade offs between fairness and challenge, dynamic difficulty adjustment approaches, playtesting methodologies, instrumentation for balance telemetry, and how progression systems and reward loops influence player retention. Discussion may include designing for multiple skill levels, difficulty modes, and how to iterate on balance using data and player feedback.