I am Gooey

DreamHack Atlanta 2019 – Student Showcase Project

PAX West 2019 – Showcase Project

Accomplishments

User Experience Design

  • Co-designed text-less tutorial, which was proven to effectively teach and guide the player through testing.

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  • Designed and implemented the particle visual effects in the game to guide the player and increase the immersion of the experience.

User Research

  • Developed and ran a usability study with 10+ players and suggested changes based on the gathered data, which resulted in an increase in the accessibility of the game.

Encounter Design

  • Worked closely with narrative/level designer on the design of the difficulty progression in the game.

User Interface Design

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  • Designed and implemented a pause menu, main menu, and the player’s HUD in a custom engine by working closely with the team’s graphics programmer.

Challenges

Custom Engine

One of the biggest challenges on the project was working in the custom engine. We as designers did not have any control over the development of it and had to use the tools that were provided. It was a challenge to get used to the custom engine, but through extensive communication with our tools programmer and my own research I was able to use the UI and particle systems to great effect throughout development.

No text in the game

Because of the minimalistic feel that we were going for we were tried to avoid putting any text in the game outside of menus. We had to come up with another way to teach the player the core puzzle mechanics of the game. We concluded that we needed confirmation of action through visual effects. I worked with our narrative/level designer to come up with an effective way to teach and guide the player using this system.

Adapting UI to multiple languages

We decided to translate our game to multiple languages, which meant that the UI also had to support it. Trying to do this in a custom engine with limited UI functionality was a big problem, but by working closely with our UI programmer I was able to make our UI support different languages to the best of our engine’s ability.