Interaction Design

This project was very challenging but I really enjoyed working on it. We had a slow start as the open brief made it difficult to come up with ideas. Once we had our idea, however, we were quick to develop it and we worked really well bouncing ideas off each other. 

We addressed the ‘homegrown’ brief quite directly, with our initial idea being all about growing your own plants and trees away from your home. The idea developed from this into caring for a virtual tree and watching it grow.

This project was a great learning experience as none of us had ventured into game design before. I learnt a lot about how interactions shape the game play and about the importance of feedback to the users actions so that they know what they are doing/have done.

Strengths:

I think our strengths were in how well we worked together as a team and each brought different perspectives and skills to the table. Our discussions always ended in productive decisions being made.

Weaknesses:

I do think our app could have used more development. We went through a lot of problem solving for each game when were ideating and designing on paper, which was good. We made a lot of important interaction decisions during this stage. But we could have done more iterations during the animation stage to make sure the interactions were as clear as they can be. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have time for this extra step of development as animating was extremely time consuming and we all had other projects and looming deadlines.

Overall, however, I think we created something we can all be proud of and from which we all learned a lot.

This is the final design for the moth game. The animation is a simulation of how the game might play out so it doesn’t show the finger swiping the moths away. We decided not to include that in our animations as it obstructs a lot of the screen which would make the gameplay unclear. 

We had our final group meeting on Wednesday during which I finished animating the moth game and the watering game. Maria finished animating the harvesting game. And Vivian finished animating the pruning game. We had to make some minor changes to keep the games consistent with each other. 

Meanwhile Lewis was working on the script for our video. Once he was done with this Maria helped me make a storyboard for our video based off the script. Meanwhile Vivian worked on the information architecture for our screens. Maria then starting designing the screens for our video. I then helped Lewis record the voiceover for the video. We ended up having to re-write the script as it was too long. 

This is stroyboard I drew up for our final video

This week we presented our idea to Emma and the class and showed my animation test at the end.

Feedback and how we are addressing it:

How to give instructions for the games and how much text is too much text?

We decided to have a semi-transparent screen before the game begins with brief instructions annotating different parts of the screen.

Waiting one day between games is too long and the user may get put off

We received this feedback from our class member, however, we feel that keeping the app as a daily game and introducing a new game per day is the right choice. The idea behind waiting is to teach that caring for a tree takes time and patience and that it is something that needs to be done daily. We also think the fact that it is a new game every day will keep the user interested and encourage them to come back. We also don’t want to make it so easy that the user finishes the entire game in one go. We want the user to work for the reward.

To address the issue of wait times putting users off however, we decided to scrap the idea that if they lose the game three times, they have to wait a certain amount of hours before they can play again. We agreed that this was unnecessary as we are already teaching time and patience through the daily aspect. Also it would be extremely frustrating for the user if it takes them a few tries just to get the hang of the game and then they can’t play anymore because they’ve lost three times. It would also take away from the ‘addictiveness’ of the games.

What are our next steps towards completing this project?

These are the assets I designed for the watering game. I’ve arranged them in a chart to show how the tree will progress / regress throughout the game depending on how the player waters it. When they water correctly, the tree will grow to the next stage. When they overwater or underwater, the tree will shrivel / regress. It will go up and down until they either grow to the final stage (win) or regress below the bottom stage (lose).