Game Design Development Log

Personal aims and objectives

As I’ve never tried UI and ICON design in a game before. So this experience was completely new. Although UI design is the part most players care least about, it is an integral part of a complete game, and the process by which the player interacts with the interface is one of the key aspects that affects the overall player experience.
With no extensive experience in game development and design, every time I make a game the process is interesting to me. It’s like constantly polishing my skills and experience through learning. I am looking forward to the experiences and new experiences that this design process will bring to me.

Development process records.

In the beginning, we had three versions of the theme. Finally, we decided to do the brain.

Meeting Minutes

1. first level brain mini-feedback (+1 for game development countries) and big feedback (can be split into different layers?) 1. first level elements (following the logic of the card suits)
2. the logic of pre’s podcast, the part that completes the narrative, see the art list document for details
3. rules for the implementation of the first level of play, with reference to the combination of service cards and phase
4. interface art, can be uncoloured, close communication required
5. Music and sound effects list
6. refine the gameplay of the second level (players get fragmented information, including visuals, music, etc., build theatre and get feedback)

3.2 Meeting notes
3.4 To be solved
[Main rule missing].
A. What are the objectives of play.
eg1- [single game goal] to populate an area so that it has a personalized art presentation; [overall goal] to construct a personalized brain in art + narrative
eg2- [Single game goal] add as much progress as possible to each area to fill it; [Overall goal] successfully fill X areas
……

B. Strategy space is given to players under this objective.
eg1-provides different non-forcing micro-goals (linking into parlays, pairs/different region settings with different counts/amounts required ……)
eg2-provides some sort of compulsory rule (two identical elements must be met to be connected adjacent to each other to increase progress)
……

C. What is the impact of implementing the strategy
eg1-[Different art performance for areas unlocked in a single game] + [Determines which area is unlocked in the next round] + [Goal of reaching a custom build brain after the total number of rounds is completed]
eg2 – [Progress of all areas populated in a single game] + [Settlement of which areas reach 100/100 progress and become interactable after the total number of rounds is completed]
……

In response to feedback on visuals and narrative, the

1. extra visual: add pre animation before the first level, the current darker (peiwei mentioned whether it was too dark) robot is actually a children’s companion robot, originally with a very cute (combined with the original cute and creepy visual style) package (consisting of three layers: wrapping carton, cute exterior, core), the player fills it like filling it with one brain partition after another, like cotton.
2. First level of in-game visuals.
   2.1 The robot’s exterior will have a visual feedback of accumulated colour layer by layer as the partitions are lit
   2.2 The individual partitions of the robot’s brain will have a two-frame representation from black and white to colour (implying an excess of black and white from the operating layer to colour in the feedback layer)
   2.3 Increased visual representation of the robot’s central control area (novice instruction)

Frame feedback.

1. addition of a central control room (foundation for novice teaching)
2. characters change as brain partitioning increases (characters coloured layer by layer)
   Positive feedback and penalties.

Playtest Records in 09/03

Maddy: Add sound feedback using the visual or the text to tell the player game background Give us aim( why does the player play that)

Abhimanyu: Keyboard control ==> player takes two roles in this game (simulate the icon; link the icon). Maybe just one part is excellent.

David： game background does not clear for the player The Keyboard Space button may be better than Keyboard J Main characters may have the animation when the player does something

Filip: Players can know the game rules but do not know why.

Yiying： Add some audio/music as guidance in the game, add some rhythm to the elements, if the player connects the right elements, it will form a song. When the player plays in the wrong direction, the game can warn.

Personal play test records： The design language of many of the buttons is unclear. The player is at a loss for words. Some are even misleading. The theme is not clearly presented. It was decided to add animations and to refine the design of the UI and the icon.

UI Design

1. UI Low fidelity chart design. First Edition

The layout of the interface is also designed like a game process. It is also like a language. The position and size of each panel are purposeful. And the information needs to be communicated to the player in a timely and efficient manner. This is what I need to consider in a low-fidelity diagram. It is also a prediction of player behavior.
After the first playtest, I found that the UI needed a lot of polishing. Many parts of the design and player encounters are not smooth and clear enough. Some of the design languages are not clear enough. And there are many fragmented and ambiguous parts. For example, the computer boot button is too small and does not have clear enough highlighting. The buttons that need to interact with the player seem to be on a level with the background. There is no obvious visual flow to guide the player. Most people would not know what to do at this step.

A large amount of white space that appears in the lower notepad would steal a lot of the player’s attention if there was no output of information or other elements that could be interacted with. But when placing the mouse over the button, the highly recognizable secondary circle appears. This allows the player to easily identify the function. However, the press button in the static state is in need of adjustment.

The frog [or mailbox] is there to remind the player to enter the password for the login process. In the second version, it was placed in the Dock and highlighted. With regard to the ease of use of the interface, it is important to keep it within the range of most gamers and to take into account the habits of most gamers when interacting with the game. As our game is similar to an operating system, we hope that the purpose of this design will be more obvious to the player.

Icon Design

The base shape of the three-button designs should match the player’s habits and reduce the cost of understanding for the user. People are inherently quicker to understand and pick up on graphics than simple text. The graphics need to be simple, clear, and intuitive to display.

In-Game

I have a question, does the layout of this piece need to be modified? This panel is part of the game settings section, the panel itself does not contain a lot of information related to the game content, and the area of the animation is about the same size as the core content at the bottom, from my personal experience, before I read the graphics I would have thought they were game instructions or something else after I identified them I realized they were buttons.

I feel like it should be better to take the text out; or scale the text up compared to the picture and then scale the whole panel down.
Players don’t easily know they are buttons in the first place, attention is stolen by the animation, players may wonder what the image means in the flow of the game, then find out there is text in the image, then know it is a button. Having searched, it seems to be more common for text and graphics to level out the UI.

Critical Reflection

During this collaboration, I always lacked much thought in the output of many design ideas to their implementation. For example, the layout of some of the UI was illogical and I always shared it with my group after it was fully completed. However, they made comments that I, as a bystander, would have been perfectly aware of in the first place. And when I was the designer, these mistakes were ignored by me. So later on in the playtest, when students raised these issues, I would give myself excuses that it was just a matter of finish, when in fact there were issues that could have been avoided at the beginning of the design. So going forward in the design process, timely playtest and lots of thinking and reflection are essential, and they need to form good habits ingrained in my way of thinking. This can greatly improve the efficiency of game production and save time in game development.

The source of inspiration for this game is our family dog, Sparrow. Because I am not at home and my parents need to travel a lot. So my sister began to take care of the sparrow. I miss her a lot. Sometimes when I video with my sister I will see her in the back. Sparrow has always been a considerate and gentle good companion and my niece also gets along very well. So I added my niece to the game as well.
The name of this game is called Puppy Nanny. The puppy needs to put the blocks in the designated place within 30 seconds. In between, there are water bombs to shoot and babies that move back and forth.

The adjustments to the game’s difficulty settings are.
1. The initial position of the puppy and the correspondence of the other parts.
2. The speed and frequency of water bomb shooting.
3. A time limit of the level.
4. The distance between the water bomb and the graphical delivery place.[ I found that most players let down their guard after the delivery of graphics and thus get hit by water bombs]
5. Rules of delivery: deliver in order and clear the history of successful deliveries after death [This will bring frustration to the player but maybe feasible in such a volume of the game.

This is a racing game to see which player can advance more steps. Most of the games I have made independently before are designed with the game system in mind after getting inspiration for the game content. But this is almost the first game where I consider the game system before the game content [such as the plot, visuals, sound effects, intuitive content, etc.]. I have to say that this design order is similar to designing the game from a player’s point of view. So this time I choose to start from the game system, I want to try to fill the flesh and blood of the game system under the premise of having a perfect framework or skeleton. This game design process can be said to be the first time since I started to study game design, I stand in a new and clear perspective of game design as a discipline.

The game system is divided into several categories, characters, levels, and replacement variables. The main text of the game is not only luck but also the calculation of the resources available to the player. The game ends when the player runs out of HP.

Players can advance one step for each win in this game. The system deals four cards at random after each new turn.
The card library contains event cards and cursed treasure chests.

Event Card

There are four types of event cards corresponding to each ability on the character card. Players need to analyze whether the current event matches their ability from the information on the card. Each event has a difficulty factor in it. Players need to repeat the numbers from 1-6 and add them up according to their ability value. The number cards need to be reshuffled after each extraction.

The event cards also contain different buffs and debuffs, but they are not the same as the buffs and debuffs drawn from the cursed box. They are not portable and will only have an effect on the room the player is currently in. If the player enters a room. The debuff of the room is cold. It will randomly cause a -1 to constitution and willpower points. The player happens to be carrying the buff: Torch, which cancels out the cold.

Curse Box Card

The contents of the curse box are divided into debuffs and buffs that can be carried as shown above. Forced acceptance.

Store Card

The store card feature requires mandatory acceptance by the player after extraction.

Role: The role is chosen by the player when he enters the game, and each role has its own good ability value. Ability values are divided into four categories: willpower, insight, combat ability, and physical strength. The event difficulty test ability value. The buffs and debuffs that can or cannot be carried will have an impact on the ability value, they can make up for the shortcomings but can also reduce the strength of the character card.

2. Levels: There are two room types under levels, event rooms and cursed chests, which are placed in the same pile. Each new round players need to randomly draw four cards from the pile and choose a room to enter. The presence of Cursed Chests turns these four variables into a currency that can be circulated to each other. The conditions of the Cursed Treasure Chest are mandatory for acceptance. So Cursed Treasure Chests are more of a test of a player’s luck.
   The event room tests the player’s various abilities, and the player can analyze whether the current event room is their area of expertise from the front of the card. If you do not pass the test of the event room, it will subtract the player’s blood. The plots in the room will produce buffs and debuffs, which are all interoperable.
3. replacement variables: divided into STA, HP, can carry or not carry buffs and debuffs. the player will consume one point of STA for each action.

The name of the game is Jungle Survival Rules. It consists of four properties of loop restraint. These four attributes are Sound Attack, Interrupt, Fortress, and Physical Attack.

Rules Introduction

1. One point is added to the winning team each turn, and when an attack is defended, one point is added to the defending team. The player who has accumulated five points wins.【 At first, I thought that after each turn, the played cards would be discarded and could not be put into the pile. But since the game has only 18 cards. It may happen that players count the remaining cards. 】Before the start of each turn players need to choose a card to display on the table and then redraw a card. So the player’s hand always remains at three cards. But one of the opponent’s cards is content.

2. Players need to draw 1 card from the pile before the start of the turn. After the turn starts, players need to re-draw 2 dark cards, hide the bright cards and shuffle them.

3.Card type attribute restraint：Sound Attack > Interrupt > Fortress > Physical Attack > Sound Attack. When players play each other’s cards across levels or repeatedly players need to use the dice to decide the winner. The player with the highest number of points wins.

This is the first version of the logic diagram, but after testing with my classmates [their help is greatly appreciated] I found that the loop was not equivalent so I readjusted the rules.

Introduction of card types

Sound Attack Cards: Cards with sounds made by small animals.
Sound attack cards include: cursing cricket, whining snail, crying crocodile, snoring piglet.

Break cards: Cards with the act of throwing.
Interrupt cards include: a frog with tongue shot, hit by bird droppings, spat on by alpaca, an elephant with snot shells

Fortress cards: Cards with the act of entering certain structures.
Fortress cards include: hiding in a nest, burrowing into a tree, hiding in a cave, burrowing into a bush

Physical Attack Cards: Cards that have damage generated by contact.
Physical attack cards include: pushed by a bear, stepped on by a rabbit, tripped over a tree, crushed by a hippo.

King Card： This card can be obtained when the player’s throw of the dice is one. On the next turn, the player can draw two cards with the King card.

Reverse Card: This card can be obtained when the player’s throw of the dice is one. He will win the match.

Card Design

In order to allow players to distinguish the different types of cards well. I chose verbs with similar attributes and different colors as labels.

The rules of the game are that a number of players form a circle and put their hands on their lap, each player takes a turn to shout Hands Hands Up, and add a number after it, this number can not be bigger than the sum of all hands present, nor can it be a negative number, all players need to shout out this number while raising their hands, one hand, or no hands up. If the number called out happens to be equal to the sum of all the hands raised, then the current player needs to put one hand behind his back, if the wrong number is called out then the game continues as usual, and the last player with a hand on his thigh is the loser. At first, my vision was to have the player put his finger up behind them. Then shout out the number while extending the hand forward. But then there was a risk of players cheating.

Following the teacher in the video when learning yoga moves I always have trouble distinguishing between left and right, and this is the source of my design inspiration.

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This game may test the player’s memory and reaction ability, each level is made of geometry stitched together, divided into AB several different plates, the player can have two seconds to observe the shape of the complete figure, after two seconds, I will take away B, leaving only A, then B will be put into the shape library, the shape library has a number of interference items, the player needs to find the real B in a limited time, with A on the mirror to match.

When I was a child, I loved to record my dreams, and the story of this game originated from a dream I had, I dreamed that I became a florist, tending the garden for others, until one day I met a beautiful lady in my dream and left a bouquet of roses in front of me. When I woke up, a rose appeared on my pillow. The feelings for the rose approximated the love between lovers, and my life began to revolve around this rose. But under my care, it wilted, so I held the rose and began to shed tears, and my tears moistened its petals so that it bloomed again. This brought me to despair, but there was nothing I could do but feel the rose decaying and rotting at my fingertips by touch.
Because the feelings in my dream were so real, I had been so concerned that I consulted an ancient Chinese book called Zhou Gong Xue Meng, a book that explains dreams, and its explanation for my becoming blind was ”You are in trouble and may run into some trouble, but no one can help you.” This was exactly the state I was in at the time, and a month ago some problems caused me to be depressed for a long time. I slowly got better when I talked to people close to me, but when I was alone, these bad moods were like beasts breaking out of their cages and tormenting me on sleepless nights, but these problems were really something I needed to face myself. The positive influence of people close to me was like the roses left to me by the beautiful lady, and I was so absorbed in it that I forgot that some problems needed to be faced and sorted out by myself, and that the kindness and care of others could not solve my current problems. So I chose to pull myself together. In my own way, I adjusted my mental state and grew.