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FER RUGAMA | ART & DESIGN
VIDEO GAME DESIGN
2020 | EXCHANGE SEMESTER PROJECT
BRIEF
Group project focused on the creation of a Coronavirus related video game to help educate its players about the transmission of the virus.
COURSE
Stage and
Elements,
FH Vorarlberg
COLLAB
Group project
(10 design students)
ROLE
UX/UI, character design, video editor & animator
TECH
Figma Premiere Pro
Illustrator Unity
After Effects
USERS & NEEDS
The definition of the users was already settled since the main purpose of the course was to create an online exhibition to educate the students of the university and their relatives about the, back then, emerging Coronavirus.
OVERVIEW
The project was developed with a group of 10 design students, and in our case we decided to divide our group in 3 sub-groups: Visual Design (my group, composed of myself and a fellow Costa Rican student, Josue Gonzales), Storytelling/Writing, and Development. We executed the project this way because there were too many tasks to develop simultaneously and it was easier for most of the group members to work on what they already knew and felt comfortable with.
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PROCESS
This project was done at an exchange semester at FH Vorarlberg (Austrian University), and to my surprise, the process of the project was slightly more experimental in comparison to my university's process.
PHASE 1: INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSIS
In this first phase we had to research about our main topic: the transmission of the Coronavirus. Since this project was made at the beginning of the pandemic, and the information about it still wasn’t well known, we did the research to completely understand how we would translate this information to a game whilst still educating the players.
Theoretical research > Definition of concept and general idea > Logistics of the game’s functionality > Graphic style definition/Storytelling, dialogues and character development > UX/UI > Promotional material > Final design
PHASE 2: APPROACH AND DEVELOPMENT
After having the theoretical base for the project, we had to define in what “medium” we wanted to develop it (we had the option to choose between a podcast, an animation series, a website, and a video game), so we chose to do an educational video game based roughly on the board game “Clue”. This decision was made because we needed to simplify the complexity of the game as much as we could to make a viable proposal that could be developed within the time frame (roughly 4 months) and because this was the first time that the Development Team was gonna use Unity (the program we used to develop the game).
GOALS
• Design a striking graphic interface for an educational videogame.
• Give an interactive and didactic learning experience to entertain and educate the users through veridical information about the Coronavirus.
CHALLENGES
The biggest challenge for this project was adapting to a more experimental methodology in which there isn't a specific linear progression to follow. The teachers gave us the opportunity to work as we wanted. Additionally, adapting to a group of local design students with a different educational background, wherein they tend to specialize in a single area (for example: focusing only on Animation, or 3D Modeling, or Graphic Design), made assigning tasks to each member of the group a bit intricate.
SOLUTION
The plot of the project concludes with a detective/guessing video game in which the player is trapped on a cruise ship with a group of passengers during the global COVID-19 pandemic. The cruise ship is supposed to have been denied access to all ports in the Mediterranean Sea. Therefore, the only way for them to gain permission to dock at one of them is to ensure that no one on board has contracted the infection.
With only 7 days available, the player must determine if anyone on board is infected. If so, they must locate and quarantine the infected individual before the 7 days are over. This is achieved by investigating each area of the cruise ship and carefully listening to the clues provided by other passengers. Dialogues serve as the main tool to educate players about the virus.
PHASE 3: STORYTELLING & GRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT
The Storytelling Group started writing the character descriptions, the dialogues, the necessary monologues, the rules of the game and the game introduction. Based on this, on the Visual Design Group we started to work on the logo, character and background designs and the UX/UI of the game. After this, we worked on a Figma prototype to test the workflow, visualization and functionality of the whole game.
PHASE 5: IMPLEMENTATION AND FINAL DESIGN
The final implementation of the project was made entirely by the Development Group in a program called Unity, taking all the design material we created and implementing it on the new program.
PHASE 4: PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL
Since the main objective of the course was to do an online exhibition with all the final products of the groups, our teachers asked each group to design different material to help promote our projects to the public in social media and also in a general website (no longer available), managed by them, with a section for each project. This meant the creation of a video teaser, social media posts, photo banners, descriptions, amongst others...
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