Category: Videogames

Doesn’t this look crude to you? Don’t worry, it’s just a minor sketch of what I would later on improve with Photoshop, but this here was my first attempt at designing a UI for my game for Stine.

I’m a fan of simple, non-intrusive interfaces, so my first attempt at a UI for the game was really empty, without much in the way of the player.

A simple health-bar and an icon representing the item at hand at the moment. Since the main focus of the game is on exploration I wanted to use as much screen real-estate as possible for the actual gameworld. Also I refused to add a mini-map on the screen at all times, since I thought that would detract my player from the feeling of immersing herself into the world.

But what if the player gets lost? What if he wants to switch items, or look at the map, or just check what the quest at hand is? Well, for those moments I designed a pause menu with all those functions built in as separate pages that the player can scroll to:

Again, the idea was to keep things simple. Not many buttons, not a thousand icons everywhere. I wanted the player to select an item to keep at hand at all times, and then switch back to another item when necessary. By switching tabs the player could read the quest list and see an overworld map with a red dot marking the current position.

During the User Experience & Prototyping class that we held at my university dedicated to designing a UI I had my partner Martin give it a look and voice his opinions on this. He had also drawn a UI for my game with the ideas he had in mind without looking at what I had done first.

The differences couldn’t be any more shocking.

While far from being very cluttered, this UI showed important information like a much bigger inventory, the name of the village or area you had just entered, a quick-slot item bar, a dialogue box, a mini-map, a quests list and a health-bar located right on top of the main character.

Some things like the mini-map I still was sure I wanted to avoid, as well as the dialogue box (since I don’t expect my game to have a lot of heavy conversations or multiple characters speaking at the same time). The alignment bar was a nice thing, since the player has the possibility of doing good or bad deeds, but I thought that this was not something that needed to be immediately seen at all times on the screen.

But this UI really made me realize about something: in my attempt to make the UI I had been thinking for myself, and not for my player. My UI was very “consolified”, more apt for big TV screens and playing with a game controller.

But Stine, as shown on my previous interviews with her, prefers to play on the computer, with mouse and keyboard. And Martin’s UI lent itself much better for that type of control.

I definitely needed to make a big change here.

So in comes my new UI. Still aiming towards the simplistic side (also please mind that this is a Photoshop mock-up, not a real in-game UI), with an inventory better geared for PC gamers like Stine, accessible from the numerical row of the keyboard (with the 6th number opening a larger inventory screen so that players can re-organize their items into the quick-access list). The health-bar I still preferred to keep on a corner so as to maintain UI distractions on the sides rather than in the middle of the screen. This game is all about enjoying the exploration after all.

As I said, this is still a far concept from what the UI would look like in the actual game. But these mock-ups and the comments from Martin helped me realize my vision closer to that of what Stine would like.

In what has probably been the craziest and funniest lecture for User Experience & Prototyping, today we learned about video prototyping. That is, creating a video that serves to test a design instead of creating a digital, coded prototype that would probably take more resources and time to prepare.

And of course a UX class is not the same if there is not a short time to experiment with the new methods learned, so today we got together in small groups to come up with a quick idea for a game… and video prototype it.

This time I worked with Morten Hansen and Lasse Hansen to create the Drunk Goblins video. Just the name and the two pictures above should give you an idea of how much fun we had working on it.

We used anything we could quickly find in the short amount of time we had (so yes, don’t expect the next Steven Spielberg production) from play dough and paper to foam to create a few set pieces that would be used to represent our idea of a game in which you control some goblins set on stealing all the brandy a St. Bernard dog uses when rescuing people up in the mountains (the St. Bernard being the restriction we had to use when coming up with the game idea).

With a few quick and extremely dirty editing touches (I didn’t even have time to take out the parts where you can hear us laughing while recording, or even saying “action”) we put up this short video.

Again, don’t expect anything big. But it’s good for a few laughs and, overall, shows up the potential of what a video prototype can do. Definitely a method worth giving another try!

Special thanks go to Wen Xiong for helping out as a goblin and Ronny Nilson for being such an awesome Swedish skier .

Let’s recap the past few weeks:

There’s Stine, the girl I have to make a game prototype for in my User Experience & Prototyping course. And she likes visiting complex, lush worlds full of mysteries to discover.

And if her previous statements playing the participatory design game and the map she drew for the cultural probe, I also have her replies to a small 7 day challenge that I prepared for her in which she had to reply every day to one interesting question with a picture and a footnote.

When asked about a place where she would like to live in she sent me the picture above: an autumnal picture, comfortable, beautiful, peaceful and pretty, as she described it.

But at the same time she told me that if she wasn’t looking for a place to relax, she would rather be somewhere else.

Stine herself described the picture this way:

“A swamp full of creeps everywhere, small lamps, spirits. I wouldn’t want to live there, but I surely would want to go there to explore it. So to answer the question of what I’d do in there, then I’d probably be a traveler/ a messenger.”

So I would say it’s quite clear. Stine likes exploration at its best. Not just wandering around, but being in mysterious areas where she doesn’t know what she will find.

So when I finally got to interview her (and recorded the entire conversation for a later transcription and analysis) I knew where I had to look for answers.

If she likes exploration, what is it about it that really makes her tick?

Obviously my interview with her wasn’t just about that. There were several topics I needed to tackle, but the most interesting one so far was the exploration element. As soon as I asked her why she liked it so much she almost went bonkers. And that’s an understatement when we’re talking about Stine: she talks fast, excited and almost yelling at the most intense moments of her explanation (of why she likes exploring, go figure…) But it’s fun nevertheless, listening to her wishes of being the first one ever to discover a new place nobody has seen before, of reaching easter eggs hidden in the gameworld and be able to tell everyone about it (but not how exactly to find it, she really respects the spoilers part of a mystery).

She will revisit areas again and again if she gets even the smallest hint that something might have changed since the last time she was there (something that apparently happens very often in one of her favorite games: World of Warcraft).

Taking that last statement in consideration I asked her what would do if she found a place where she knows there is a secret but cannot reach it for some reason. Her reply was that such knowledge is enough to warm her up and she will probably try for a long time to reach that secret, no matter what. What if she cannot make it? Then she will look for help online, but once again, a guide without spoilers, that only tells how to reach the area, not what lies hidden in it.

This reminded me a lot about the Zelda games, where many times the player has the access blocked to certain areas even though the game seems to be open-world. Would this limitation bring Stine down? Not a chance! I asked her about it and she gave me an example taken out from GTA III, where there was this metro station that was locked. Being in front of the door, knowing that it can be opened somehow but she wasn’t able to made her really curious to know what she would find in there, and she kept trying for a while. But once she figured out she couldn’t do it, she thought that maybe the area would open up later in the game. What did she do then? Well… she came back after every mission to see if it was open already!

On the other hand she really dislikes games that try to give the feeling of an open-world but in reality they are full of invisible walls. Her example this time was Guild Wars, where she says that it’s mostly a world full of corridors, like a forest that has trees functioning as a full wall to prevent the player from going out of the area intended. About this she says it is really frustrating, because you could really see the limits of this world, them being very tangible.

As she said it with her own worlds: “Don’t give me an open world map and then tell me that I can’t go there, it’s annoying!”

So there you go, those are some of the insights that I got during Stine’s interview about why she likes exploration in games. Obviously there was a lot more we talked about, both about exploration and about other topics like her gaming habits (how often she plays games and when and where) and what kind of game characters she likes, or what the protagonist should be like.

More to come soon!

Isn’t this map amazing? This island… it’s so mesmerizing! Check out all the tiny little details in it! There’s a whirlpool, an ice volcano (yes, it’s ice, not lava) and look at that little light bulb at the top of the lighthouse!

Now, I wish I could say that I have drawn that, but sadly my skills are nowhere that good.

Instead this was a drawing by Stine, my muse for the User Experience & Prototyping course at the IT University of Copenhagen.

How did this get to happen? Well, after that little participatory design game I showed her where she came up with the idea of a desert island with a jungle in it, I decided it would be an interesting idea to see her try to draw her own map of an island and fill it up with anything that she found interesting. This was part of my cultural probe which I used to gain more insight into how Stine thinks, acts and what she likes.

When one week later she came to me with this map I was shocked. Definitely so much more than what I expected. It’s clear that she had a lot of fun drawing this!

And she didn’t just draw a bunch of random stuff. She gave a lot of thought to even the tiniest little detail, and she explained to me what this was all about.

The most interesting thing was that many of the things she didn’t really know why they were there. What are those things on the southwest island? Stones? Rocks? Monuments? She said she didn’t know, but she so badly wanted to be able to dive into her own world to see it with her own eyes and discover the mystery of the stones.

The same goes for the houses Northeast. They look like little hills where people live inside them. I asked Stine if those were hobbit holes, and she declined the idea. There could be hobbits inside, sure, but wasn’t it more exciting to go there and discover for yourself? Also they live near a swamp, and who knows what kind of creatures could live there…

What about the castle? Does anyone really live there anymore? Especially with that misty, creepy forest so close to it… Apparently those skeletons from the participatory design game are in that forest, so you might not want to wander for too long in there.

Want more? How about the little village next to the beach? It’s kinda small, but it seems protected from all dangers around thanks to the cliff.

Those are just some of the things that Stine told me about her map of the island. An island that she really wanted to visit, explore and get lost in it, learn its mysteries and who knows what she could find in it?

If this is not a very clear indicator of what Stine wants in a game, then I don’t know what is. As in the participatory design game the keyword here is exploration.

But don’t trust me for this. There’s still a lot of work ahead, and soon enough an interview will reveal more details about Stine’s obsession with exploring new worlds!

Sometimes you just have no ideas at all when you want to make a game. At least not when you need to create a game for a very specific target audience. And, as mentioned in one of my previous posts, this audience is Stine.

Luckily there are a lot of tools that can help a designer come up with something interesting, and one of my favorites we have learned so far in my User Experience & Prototyping course at the IT University of Copenhagen is the Participatory Design Game, or PD for short.

The objective is very simple: in short it consists of creating a short and simple activity that will open up the creativity of your “muse” you’re creating the game for (Stine) and give you ideas of what she will like.

Martin Ørbæk and I created a card game designed specifically for that. Each card has a concept drawn in it, be it a game character, an environment or a weapon or item. These concepts can be combined together to make even more concepts. For example, you can combine a gun with a laser, and you get a “laser gun”, or put together space and an island, and you get a “space island”.

But it is not us who were supposed to combine those. It’s Stine who had to play the game, drawing cards one by one from a pile, all facing the table, and combine those concepts as she sees fit to her liking.

As such Stine showed me her taste and preferences when it comes to videogames. She quickly dismissed certain ideas like those of a monster or space (she doesn’t like space travelling or spaceships, but can live with a game that takes place in space), while preferring environments that would be interesting to explore.

I found it funny that she didn’t use the skeleton card as an enemy, but rather as a remain of a dead body in a desert island, which fueled her interest in discovering how that person died.

A few more cards drawn later, she told me the story of those skeletons: they became ghosts. But not just any type of ghosts, those were explosive ghosts (by making use of the bomb card).

It’s very easy to make a story with Stine around, she doesn’t simply combine ideas. Instead she creates a full world breathing with background stories and interesting characters (the protagonist is a small boy with a sword and a shield who can also conjure spells, but he doesn’t really know how to use them).

It’s a very interesting take on starting a new game as a designer. You’re no longer thinking about doing what you would like to do, but rather making the ideas that she likes into a fully realized game. And it is something that I intend to see through to the end for this course.