dventure waits in a mysterious, abandoned world,
overrun with living pollution. Charming creatures known as Fauna have
survived in this beautiful yet inhospitable environment.
You can help them build a new, clean world for themselves: become a Caretaker!>
Role
UI Designer
Create wireframe, flow, Style guide¬, final assets and Implementation
Challenge and Discovery
Took a long time to figure out targeted persona(office ladies between ages 45 and 55)'s expectations
Thus adult female game players can be very dedicated to their play,
whether it encompasses a more “hardcore” MMOG or more user-friendly
single-player games like those in the Diner Dash (Game Lab, 2003) series.
This suggests that players of casual as well as more mainstream games
may be anything but casual in how they approach play. Thus we need to be
extremely cautious in thinking through their motivations for play, as well as
what types of games might “logically” appeal to female players.
In contrast to the relatively lower number of female players in MMOGs,
casual games have almost consistently featured a strong female demographic
for a player base, with that group also older than the typical male console gamer.
Wire-frames : Wire-framing is a great technique that
allows you to iterate quickly with little cost to time or energy.
Based on the trials above I came up with a low fidelity mock-up which
improves the dashboards structure and functionality.
HUD was one of challening that we spend a lot of time to make it right.
We conducted multiple usability section just for the HUD matter
Prototype
Create in-game tutorial : Player can visit this anytime during game.
We proved to player who was not familiar traditional MMO how to see, read, and use UI effiently wihtout frustration.
One of way was constantly remind them with tutorials.
Since Faunsphere is web brower game, using Flash was quick and easy yet powerful and flexible
The idea of working with Flash may seem daunting, but the effort required to create a basic click-through
is comparable to that required by other applications, while the flexibility and potential for extending
the prototype is far greater.
Flash prototyping allows you to add interactivity to screen designs and wireframes you’ve
already created. You don’t have to recreate the layouts in another application.
Implementation
Flash was getting heavy and caused a lot of loading time.
Game performance testing was one of big deal when we close to ship game
Implementing optimization techniques had to be developed very soon
Perforce only allow one person to edit
Fresh eye test & Iteration
Bring player internal labs to fresh eye test
One of our research questions asks what role the fiction of Faunasphere
plays in shaping player motivation. While the data from our survey
supports some earlier findings about the importance of achievement in play,
the fictional world of Faunasphere offers some complications to how we conceptualize
our ideas of achievement and what ‘counts’ as such activity. To review,
survey respondents overwhelmingly preferred in-game tasks and activities
that generally fall under the achievement component. The only social component
that was included as an option was “interacting with friends,” which out of seven
choices was ranked fifth, suggesting it was not very popular among respondents.
