Glowmade
King of Meat’s UGC Create Mode
2025 ✦ Principal UX Designer
What’s the problem?
Can you make a UGC editor that serves both an audience of young teens on console and PC, and a studio’s internal level design team?
TL;DR
I shipped an improved level editor UGC tool, incorporating industry best practice, player and publisher feedback and hitting Amazon’s Silver level of accesibility standards.
Context and stakes
King of Meat was a multiplayer console party game developed by Glowmade, and published by Amazon Game Studios. A core pillar of the game was the concept that “whatever the dev team can build, so can the player”, through the game’s Create mode.
When I joined, Create had many layers of functionality, but needed to be adapted to be appropriate, understandable and accessible for our young teen audience.
Constraints
Making a UGC tool that can be manipulated by several different input methods (KBAM and controller) is uniquely challenging.
We had a constrained timeline in which to make changes to the editor, and needed to ensure that anything we “fixed'“ for our players didn’t break the internal tooling used by our level design team!
Mapping the problem
It became immediately obvious that we had an issue both in the core experience of the UGC product, and also in players’ discovery of UGC levels.
Both needed to be targered in different project phases.
UI Benchmarking
I evaluated the existing interface of our UGC tool against competitors in the market, our internal standards and accessibility goals.
With production, I worked to make this into an actionable plan of attack for upping the quality of the shipped product.
High Fidelity UI Design
And most importantly of all… implementation details for engineers!
The Future
Due to tight time constraints, we were unable to ship some of the more extensive Create meta features before launch. I was given leadership responsibilities for delivering these features post-launch (such as improvements to the Discovery flow, and new tooling such as the clutter brush), which I delivered successfully before the game was sunset.