today we were encouraged to explore ‘franken-models’, where we sketched out our ideas in 3D for our third assessment of this semester. it’s a quick, cost-effective and efficient way to test designs, encounter issues and fix them in the early development stages.
it was interestingly pointed out how as communication designers, physically developing things with our hands can be one of the last stages of our process while for an industrial designer it is the very first.
this task gave a unique perspective on thinking, but with our hands.
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Amy is a calligrapher and a card maker who loves hand making things. After the interview I was inspired to hand make cards, thus changing my initial idea of a zine to an “insert” with loose cards that consist of question and answers on each side of the cards. As a perfectionist, Amy likes her work to be centred so I've decided to cut out the middle bit to frame everything. Something that I will try to keep in mind is to not imitate her style, or work but creating something that would contrast and highlight her way of thinking and design. e.g What is she thinking? What does she emphasise?
Last week, I went to Tallinn to participate in a 48 hour game jam. The whole trip was arranged by Game Camps, an incentive to get peeps across the Nordic countries to cooperate more by encouraging them to make games together!
I didn’t know anyone going into it, so it was a pretty intense week of game building with initially strangers. It was super exhausting for sure, but I am super glad I went. My team had a total of five members - two programmers, me, one marketer and one audio designer. I took the role of artist and game designer - however we took care to carefully discuss and test the initial design together so I was certainly not the only one designing in the group :)
Anyway! We ended up winning, whaaat!
From the left; Jazeps Rutkis, Mika Simula, Sebastian Larsson (that’s me!), Jean-Philippe Dumont. Kristaps Auzins, one of our programmers, is sadly missing from this picture!
People have been asking what this magical game was about exactly, so I figured I’d do a quick overview and share some details about the process!
WHAT IS ROCK PAPER FEELINGS?
In short, Rock Paper Feelings is about integrating strategy and drama into one experience, allowing both to influence one another.
You play as the leader of a bunch of individuals set to ~save the world~. Here is the catch - you are all birds, and birds are very driven by their emotions- meaning a bird’s abilities is a result of their current emotional state. You, as their leader, must manipulate your fellow bird friends into the right emotions for current and future battles in order to combat increasingly emotionally dramatic enemies.
Screenshot from the finished prototype
ORIGINAL INSPIRATION
My original inspiration for this comes from Persona 4, which is a combination of a JRPG a dating simulator. Here players must deepen their NPC relationships in order to create creatures of higher and higher power. As I became more proficient in optimizing my relationships, I noticed that my actions were driven by what I thought would make my digital friends like me the most - rather than what I personally felt. This shift from genuine interest to straight up manipulation was not addressed by the game - but as a player I felt like a sociopath, optimizing for most value rather than my own feelings!
Main character Yu in Persona 4. Hero or manipulative butt?
Original pitch
I was inspired to explore this theme further, and thus the idea of a leader manipulating their party to enter a certain emotional state emerged. I quickly realized this could be quite destructive if not handled properly - as a result I decided to make everyone anything but humans to distantiate it from real manipulation, and to keep the tone quite light. The initial pitch was simply that of a leader manipulating their team of birds to feel certain ways in order to succeed long term. A combination of strategy and drama.
Wait, how do we do that?
After assembling a team based on interested people (which were from Latvia, Canada, Finland and Sweden!) we started defining just how one could integrate social manipulation and combat. In terms of feelings, we did not know what feelings would be included, how they would affect combat, or how one manipulated them. Due to our time limit, we decided to keep it simple and make combat grid-based and played out in a single round - no enemy AI or multiple step battles. As a further attempt to simplify, we decided to implement a simple rock paper scissors system with feelings - where one feeling always beats the next one in a circle.
Integrating feels into combat
The next question was how to even affect feelings. Originally, we theorized that the player could manipulate feelings in the journeys between battles - allowing the positioning of the team members to affect their emotional state. However, we quickly realized that if we could implement the feeling manipulation directly into combat - we could convey our entire intention within one core gameplay loop! This was great, because the strategy and drama would be intertwined.
Thus, feelings were designed to be changeable through combat. We came up with two parameters players could manipulate.
Lonely <-> Friendly
Brave <-> Scared
The player can change their bird’s friendliness to loneliness parameter by placing them close or far away from other birds. Bravery is affected by a bird’s individual battle results - meaning a bird which continually loses a battle will become scared while a winning bird becomes braver.
Paper prototyping!
After defining these rough overarching mechanics, we created what would become the foundation for our next two days - a paper prototype! Since the game was turn based, it was quite easy to test our ideas on paper. We spent at least six hours just discussing our core design and iterating on it it using this paper prototype.
Except for confirming our envisioned implementation was indeed quite interesting (on paper!), we also found that the player was given two goals;
1. To win the current battle.
2. To change the feelings of their birds to fit future fights
These two goals does not always work with each other - for example one may need a scared and lonely bird for a future battle - forcing the player to make at least one bird always lose! We have a short term goal of winning the current battle, and a long term goal of manipulating the birds to fit future demands. Thus a tricky trade-off is created where the player is constantly balancing short and long-term goals.
Makin’ it
After we had established a tested core design with our paper prototype, it was pretty easy to implement this design in a digital prototype. The rest of the work was largely about implementing and communicating the mechanics of the paper prototype in a cohesive way and drawing a ton of birds. Smooth sailing in terms of design work!
As the lone artist, I got to draw almost everything! Lots of fun! C:
Final result
According to testers, the prototype succeeded in combining strategy and drama, at least to some regard! Players seem to experience the conflict between short term and long term goals, and there is at least a vague sense of drama created from changing the emotional state of characters - depending on the person playing it. I am very pleased and surprised that we were able to realize our goals in only 48 hours.
We still have some polishing and talking to do before releasing our baby bird to the world, but if you are interested in testing the prototype, feel free to DM me and I’ll send you an .exe ! :)
Mocha Magic - Art | Production | Programming | Prototype Design
Create the perfect drink and make friends along the way.
Mocha Magic (Unity) - A drink-making visual novel in which the owner of a new cafe discovers that the real “perfect drink”—was the friends we made along the way.
Mocha Magic is my team’s senior capstone project for the UCSC: Games and Playable Media major (full credits on itch.io). The game was developed over the course of a school year; pre-production began in October 2020, production began in January 2021, and the game released in June 2021. Our entire development cycle took place remotely through the COVID-19 lockdown. I was the Art Director, and also helped with programming.
Mocha Magic was one of the winners for the UCSC Games Showcase Sammy Awards in the Visual Art category.
My main roles in this project were art direction (including production, concept art, and 2D character asset creation), character design, programming, and prototype design (including a playable prototype Unity build).
Keep reading to see my full writeup of contributions to this game.
As Art Director, my main responsibilities were to manage and delegate tasks to other members, coordinate with other departments, and create art assets myself. In addition, because I had programming experience, I also helped code the prototype/proof-of-concept, and implemented assets and a few features in Unity.
Prototype Design
We started out with paper prototyping; due to everything being remote throughout the 2020-2021 school year, our prototype was done over Tabletop Simulator, using various tokens and normal playing cards.
Our original concept contained the same core as the final game, but was about witches and potions instead of a cafe and drinks. The main difference was that the player had to gather resources for potions, which would depend on the phases of the moon. Potions could then be crafted to give to NPCs, which would advance their narrative depending on what potions they liked.
This paper prototype was then used to inform the Unity proof-of-concept prototype. Though I was mainly an artist, I was also the only person not on the programming team who was proficient at coding. Since our only programmer at the time was busy with classes, I was responsible for creating the Unity proof-of-concept/prototype.
None of this code is used in our final game, as I made it quickly and knowing it would be thrown out, and several features were added or removed. However, this prototype let us determine what was technically possible/in-scope, and helped us picture our final game.
The prototype took about 2 weeks to complete. After finishing this prototype, I sent out the project to the programmers and included some quick documentation explaining the various scripts’ structures and functions.
Below is some footage of the prototype, demonstrating ingredient gathering, potion making, and potion delivering. The moon phase, illustrated with cute cats, is visible in the top left of the second clip below.
(Note: the framerate on this gif was lowered to reduce flashing. I can only upload one video, so this second one is a gif)
Programming - Dynamic Drink Display
In addition to the prototype, I also helped implement assets and code various UI sections. As an example, in our final game, our drink sprites are displayed with procedurally. Since I had the concept for this system, I initially coded it and then assisted the programming team with its final touches.
Our drinks have 1 “base” tag and 1 or 2 “ingredient” tags. After learning from the programmers that this information was passed around as a string, I created a script that would display different combinations of sprites depending on these tags. This way, we didn’t have to draw dozens of different drink sprites for each recipe to feel different.
Below is a gif of a video I sent the team showing the successful implementation of the proof-of-concept.
Art & Production
Each week, I planned and facilitated the art department meeting, where all of the artists gave feedback to each other, and I assigned them their tasks for the following week. When our build was playable, I also started each meeting going through the content that had been added or changed, so everyone was up to date on how our game played and looked. Between meetings, I checked in with artists individually to check on their progress, workload, and mental health. I also gave feedback and paintovers when needed or requested.
Most of my task tracking work was done through spreadsheets, rather than a program such as Jira. Though our team experimented with various options during pre-production, such as ClickUp, team members struggled with keeping their own task progress updated. I decided working with what was familiar would be best for such a tight timeline, and moved the art department’s tasks to a spreadsheet that I kept updated through frequent checkins.
2 weeks’ worth of tasks on our task tracking spreadsheet. Names other than mine have been blocked out for privacy.
In addition to production, I designed and made the assets for 3 characters, including the playable character Machi. The three characters below are Machi, Katiya (the "rival"), and Parvana (the "tired scientist").
Machi is the only character with a full walk animation, due to time constraints.
In addition to character assets, I also worked on UI layouts and assets. I also designed the logo for both the game and our team's studio logo.
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After some procrastination I finally finished writing the rules for Compost - a card game I developed during Fall Game Jam 2022. Here is how it looked when it started versus how it looked at latest playtesting at ESG Spelklubb.
I wrote a bit on the creation process on my blog and uploaded a print and play version of it.
Most of these courses are no longer available on Lynda or have since been updated. However, here are the certificates for the original dates.
These course are rated Intermediate in terms of skill level and total duration is 2h 35m.
UX Design: 1 Overview (2013), Completed 2016
UX Design: 2 Analyzing User Data, Completed 2016
Who are your users? What are their challenges? How can your design solve their needs? UX research can help you answer these questions, and many more. In this installment of UX Design Techniques, Chris Nodder walks through the process of acquiring user data and transforming that data into actionable project ideas. Learn how to observe users interacting with a prototype or simply performing tasks, build experience maps that depict those interactions, analyze the data, and extract ideas for new products and features.
UX Design: 3 Creating Personas (Completed 2016)
UX Design: 4 Ideation (Completed 2016)
UX Design: 5 Creating Scenarios and Storyboards (Completed 2016)
From personal experience and from my attempts with using GDevelop so far, it can take me quite a while to learn the basic ins and outs of a new software.
After playing around a little bit with the software, I don’t think learning using trial and error will work with this one.
I’m going to follow some tutorials and read up on some resources so I can actually know what I’m doing before I try and make something of my own.
This need to fully learn how to use GDevelop will and has put back my expected date for a playable prototype of the snaresnake game, but from this I’ve realised that I made a mistake in thinking I would be able to understand how to use GDevelop straight away and then make something worthwhile.
So there was a good take away here! Which is progress in my books. Learning is learning afterall.
The plan I’m going to put in place for prototyping
While GDevelop will produce a better and not to mention playable protoype of the game, I’m not very fluent in how to use it to create my visions yet.
So, while I continue to learn the GDevelop systems, I will illustrate my concepts and ideas on paper. This paper prototyping will allow me to get my thoughts and aspirations down quickly and easily.
Both forms of prototyping will come in handy for gathering feedback for improvement.
The paper prototypes will help inform the GDevelop playble prototype and will help ensure time isn’t wasted on mechanics and ideas that playtesters said they wouldn’t understand or find fun in the game. And as the paper prototypes can be quickly changed or redone the concepts on them can be changed and reworked as feedback is being given about them.
With all this been said, I am now going to either watch some tutorials or do some concept drawing or both! I need to get both done anyways, just need to figure out which to do first :D
