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
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After testing my 2D prototype on 6+ people I’ve found that the most common mistake when assembling the gun was orientation of the pieces. I believe this problem will be less prevalent when the puzzle is translated to 3D, as the sections that attach will be protruding outward, but I also plan to make the attachable areas glow in some way to make sure this problem doesn’t transfer.
I think it might be an idea to highlight the areas that attach in some way when making my next 2D paper prototype; to see if it helps at this stage.
I have finished a 2D prototype of the sniper gun puzzle to test on my peers as soon as I can!
The design of the prototype is using the TF2 Sniper’s sniper rifle as that is what I had in mind for the gun’s look; simple in terms of design but yet recognisable as what it is.
I am also working on cutting out a 3D version of the puzzle to see if that has any bearing on the difficulty of the assembly when tested on people. But due to it taking longer to make the 3D prototypes, I will first prioritise making all my prototype puzzle designs 2D.
So far this week I have been mocking up puzzle designs for the levels, as the game is centred around assembling your weapon in time to shoot I must make the task interesting.
I’ve decided that the designs should not be all ‘sniper rifle-esk’ to provide more avenues of creativity, I will try to add rocket launcher designs and pistols both of comic proportion/use.
So far I have the simple sniper design of 3 parts, with an alternate design of 5 parts. There is also the ‘stinger’ rocket launcher which I chose as it has lock on capabilities in most games so the player doesn’t need to worry about aiming the projectile, this one consists of 4 parts.
A mini-gun design of 11 parts that will spray over a large area (again to eliminate aiming problems, as I don’t want that to be the focus of the game), a scoped revolver design of 5 parts, and finally a flare gun comprised of 4 parts.
The flare gun could make the building explode, as though a orbital strike had happened, but depending on scaling and time it may just kill with the flare itself.
