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Episode Summary

You have spent months, maybe years, on your game. The systems work, the art looks good, and you are proud of what you built. Then someone plays it for the first time and gets stuck on the settings menu, or quits ten minutes in because they never understood what the game wanted from them. It is not a bug. It is not bad art. It is UX, and most indie devs never learn to see it until it is already too expensive to fix.

Ruwan Fernando spent 17 years inside AAA game development, building UX teams from scratch and shipping more than 30 titles, including Call of Duty Modern Warfare, the Splinter Cell remake, Company of Heroes 2, Anthem, and Driver San Francisco. He built the right to left localization system used across Ubisoft’s menu architecture, set the UX North Star on a major user generated content project alongside Assassin’s Creed’s head of content Jean Guédon, and now runs Go Boldly, bringing that same AAA level UX thinking to indie studios and startups who never had access to it before.

In this conversation, Ruwan walks through the five questions he asks every studio before they start building, why comparative analysis feels like the most logical place to start your design process but is actually the worst, and how one North Star statement, make the interface ultra simple, ultra accessible, shaped the entire design language of a genuinely complex UGC game. He also breaks down why accessibility and usability are the same thing, using his own experience with foot surgery and blurry vision to make the point that disability is something almost everyone experiences, just not always permanently.

If you have ever finished a build, handed it to a friend, and watched their face go blank at your menu screen, this episode is for you.

Meet Our Guest: Ruwan Fernando, Go Boldly

Ruwan actually started his career at an indie studio called Action Pants, which was almost immediately acquired and became Ubisoft Vancouver. From there he worked across nearly every genre AAA has to offer, FPS, mobile, real time strategy, action adventure, live service, racing, sports, and user generated content, along with emerging tech like the Nintendo Wii and Xbox Kinect.

He grew from a principal designer working alone to directing teams of up to 30 designers, eventually becoming a top mentor on the ADPList platform and a contributor to Toronto Metropolitan University’s design program. In 2024 he worked on the Black Panther game before it was shelved, building its front end narrative from a completely blank slate. He also helped launch the accessibility category at the Canadian Game Awards, and will be judging it this year.

Today Ruwan runs Go Boldly and Prismic Technologies, consulting with indie teams and startups that have little to no in house UX knowledge, bringing them the same frameworks and philosophies he built over nearly two decades in AAA.

Website: Go Boldly

LinkedIn: Ruwan Fernando

Website: ADP Mentor List

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Key Takeaways

“UX design creates conversation between the creator’s vision and the player’s expectation. We’re just trying to draw them together like a magnet.”

— Ruwan Fernando, Go Boldly

• UX is a process, not a menu screen. The UIs, menus, and HUDs players interact with are artifacts of a process, not the process itself. Ruwan compares it to a piano without a keyboard, still an incredible piece of technology, but it takes the keyboard to let a player actually coax music out of it.
• Ask your five questions before you build, not after. Ruwan’s Big Five, do you understand your player intimately, what makes your idea special, how will players find it, how does money come in, and where does it go, are questions every AAA studio answers by default. As an indie, you have to answer them yourself, and it is far cheaper to do it before development than after you have shipped.
• Comparative analysis is the worst place to start. It feels like the most logical move, look at what is already working and build something similar. But every shipped game is full of compromises you cannot see, budget cuts, engine limits, timeline pressure. Copy the result and you inherit the compromise without knowing why it worked, or how to make it better.
• A North Star can carry an entire project. On one UGC game, Ruwan’s creative director gave him a single line, make the interface ultra simple, ultra accessible. That one sentence became the constraint that shaped every design decision on a genuinely complex system.
• Constraints are what make design clever. Without them, Ruwan says, you end up with a convoluted, inconsistent interaction system. A real design system exists to take options away, which is what forces consistency and cleverness in the first place.
• Battle Pass in one game does not mean Battle Pass in yours. Ruwan points to Game of Thrones Mobile borrowing Modern Warfare’s Battle Pass model without asking whether it fit a five to ten minute mobile session instead of a 20 minute to hour long console session. Same mechanic, completely different context, and it showed.
• Accessibility is usability, full stop. Ruwan reframes disability as something most people experience, whether through aging, injury, or something as simple as needing glasses. Multi sensory feedback, skippable dialogue, and reduced repetitive tasks cost very little to build and open your game to a dramatically wider audience.
• Chasing photorealism has a worse return than chasing usability. Ruwan’s closing advice is that photorealism has diminishing returns and just makes your game look like everyone else’s. Investing in how easy and rewarding your game is to play compounds instead, because it directly drives the retention numbers that actually determine a game’s success.

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Show Notes & Mentioned Resources

About Ruwan Fernando and Go Boldly

• Go Boldly: https://goboldly.co
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruwan-f/
• ADPList mentorship: https://adplist.org/mentors/ruwan-fernando

Frameworks Mentioned

• The Big Five Questions
• North Stars
• Constraints as Filters
• The Cone of Uncertainty
• The Comparison Paradox

Games Mentioned

• The Calling by BuriedCandy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3830400/The_Calling/
• Chants of Sennaar: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1931770/Chants_of_Sennaar/
• Tethergeist by Owenco Games, referenced as an example of player first iteration
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, referenced in the authenticity discussion

Tools Mentioned

Xbox Accessibility Guidelines: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility/xbox-accessibility-guidelines/

The Gamer’s Brain by Celia Hodent: https://thegamersbrain.com/

Can I Play That: https://caniplaythat.com/

AbleGamers: https://ablegamers.org/

WCAG Accessibility Guidelines: https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

Key Frameworks from This Episode

1. The Big Five Questions. Before you build, answer who your player is, what makes your idea special, how players will find it, how money comes in, and where it goes.
2. North Stars. A single guiding statement, like make the interface ultra simple, ultra accessible, that every design decision can be measured against.
3. Constraints as Filters. Use real limitations, platform, budget, player type, to decide which ideas are worth keeping and which need to be cut.
4. The Cone of Uncertainty. Start wide with ideas, then narrow through testing until what comes out the other end is evidence, not just more assumptions.
5. The Comparison Paradox. Comp analysis is a great place to start, but a dangerous place to stop. Deconstruct why something works before you borrow it.

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