Robin-Yann Storm
Robin-Yann Storm is a freelance Product & UX Designer for Tools. They have worked as a full time Tool UX Designer in the AAA games industry on the Glacier 2 editor on which the Hitman series was built, the Decima editor on which the Horizon series was built, and spent a few years working at Apple on AR creation tools such as Reality Composer and Reality Converter, which has made them well acquainted with the workflows of Pixar’s USD framework.
They have consulted companies both big and small on workflows, tools, and UGC. Next to that, they created and organizes the Tool Design Roundtables, talks at conferences around the world, and has contributed a chapter about Tool Design in the book ‘An Architectural Approach to Level Design, Second Edition’.
Sessions
Everyone always mentions that people do not read documentation. This is also the case for us as game developers. So what can we do about that? First, it is important not to force everyone to read pages and pages of documentation. Usually, only programmers and other technical folks go through all the effort of reading up on functionality. So what about artists, and designers? Thankfully, solutions already exist: Gyms, Zoos, and Museums. Let's look at examples, see how they work, how they can be built, and how they improve the development of your games.
When creating plugins, publicly available tools, or in-house one off fixes, it can be easy to shoot for only exactly what the tool is supposed to achieve. However, this can have unforeseen consequences when the tool achieves exactly what it needs on its own, but does not fit within the other workflows that users are working with. The user experience as a whole is important to consider, especially for publicly available tools.