Faerie Festival has concluded and I'm excited to share that I got to work with the wonderful Neopets team to bring it to life! In this article, I'll break down some goals we had with this event and how it was designed.
About Faerie Festival
Faerie Festival is an annual event on Neopets dedicated to celebrating Neopia's Faeries! Every year it's hosted in a different location by a different Faerie.
The Problem
We also have another Faerie-related event called 'Faerie Quest' that started in these last few years and this confused users with the Faerie Festival event we would host. We received feedback from the community that, despite its name, the festival event felt lackluster in comparison as well.
The Solution
For this year we decided to combine these two events into one and call it the 'Faerie Festival' to make things more exciting and limit confusion. We set the below event goals:
Combine the Faerie Quest event with Faerie Festival
Add teasers for....PLOTTTT
Convert and bring back past year's Faerie Festival pages and activities
Our Creative Director worked on creating the story for the event, and I worked on creating the flow and wireframes while keeping in mind the story beats. Once we had the general outline, we went to work on how we can get players involved with the story.
In the story, Fyora has the Faeries Illusen and Jduhora tag team to plan the Festival...but things don't go so smoothly. They both decide to go off on their own and do their own planning themselves...even sending out separate invitations to each of their festivals! We thought this could be a great opportunity to get players more involved and immersed in the story. So we had players get actual invitations from Illusen and Jhuora themselves, and...they had to pick a team! What team would you pick!?
This proposed an interesting design problem of how we were going to give invitations to players, some ideas we had were:
Neomail
Social Media
Picking a team directly through the Faerie Festival page through the dialogue system
Pop Up
To make things easier on implementation we ended up going with a pop-up!
User Flow
FigJam Brainstorming and Overall Event Flow
Wireframes
Below are some wireframes that I designed to highlight the invitations, item submissions, and prize shop.
The Result
Overall the event was received really well by the community and brought about some cool prizes for players to get! Players could also use this event to clean out their inventory and safety deposit box.
