Latency Testing
Quantitative:
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Quantitative data answers what is happening using numbers
(e.g., error counts, completion rates, time on task, crash frequency)
Best Stage: Alpha → Post-Launch
Primary Goal: Evaluating performance, responsiveness, and gameplay stability under different network conditions
Effort: High
Overview
A case study in game design is a detailed breakdown of a real project that explains what problem was tackled, how it was approached, what decisions were made, and what was learned along the way.
Rather than just showing the final game or feature, a case study walks through the process behind it.
What a Game Design Case Study Includes
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Context: What game, feature, or system was being designed
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Goal or Problem: What needed to be solved (e.g., onboarding confusion, balance issues, retention drop)
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Approach: The design and research methods used (playtesting, usability testing, surveys, analytics, etc.)
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Decisions: Key design choices and tradeoffs
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Outcomes: What changed as a result (improved clarity, smoother flow, better player feedback)
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Lessons Learned: What worked, what didn’t, and what you’d do differently next time
How to make a case study
Building a game case study doesn't always mean covering the entire development cycle. Instead, you can zoom in on specific elements—like UI patterns, mechanics, or systems—to extract meaningful insights.
A typical case study might start with a brief introduction that covers:
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The game’s premise
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Its genre and platform
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And why it's relevant to your current project or research
Rather than summarizing the entire game, I often focus on specific elements that align with something I'm designing or solving. For example, I might compare the customization systems in multiple games to gather inspiration for a new feature I'm working on. These types of focused case studies are quicker to produce and immediately useful in a design or dev sprint.
For this case study, our focus was on exploring the user experience (UX) of customization systems across various games and platforms. We wanted to understand how different games approach customization from both a design and usability perspective.
To organize our analysis, we categorized the games into two groups:
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Games with UX patterns we were particularly interested in
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Games with notable customization systems
We used Figma to structure and share our findings with the team. For each game, we documented the following:
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Title
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Main Focus
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What Worked Well
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What Didn’t Work Well
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Key Observations
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At the end, we included a brief conclusion summarizing insights across all the games we reviewed, helping us identify patterns and potential design directions for our own project.
This overview was designed to be digestible and quick to reference, especially for team discussions and design sprints. To make comparisons even easier, we created a matrix chart to rank and visualize our findings across the games. This allowed us to spot patterns and prioritize design ideas for our own customization system.
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UX-Focused Game Case Study Examples
Below is a curated selection of game case studies that take a more holistic approach—combining UX design, user research, and game mechanics—to analyze player experience.
Animal Crossing | UX + Game Design Case Study
​Exploring concepts to reach ‘New Horizons’ by Jared Suasin
Set in the world of SpongeBob SquarePants, players embark on a hilarious culinary adventure managing the restaurants of Bikini Bottom. As a time management game, the objective is to efficiently feed characters from the cartoon series by preparing dishes like pancakes.
by Tilting Point and Punchev