This week, we have finally broken out of our shell. We started a prototype and we brought that to QA which had a relatively small pool of responses, but nonetheless positive feedback. But before tackling that, there is something good that we have made work this week, which is a semi-new design process.
Minute-By-Minute
Our client told us in the past that they want a “minute-by-minute” experience from us to prove the concept, and this has been our focus to make sure we are on the right path while focusing on the concept. So, this week, the team met and we drafted many game details and what the minute-by-minute should look like. Then, as a designer, I took the ideas we had and drafted a moment by moment narrative of the player experience, with what the player would have to do right or wrong to proceed. At first, it was really sloppy, and really took some time before getting into a readable format. But eventually, it made it, and we now have a gameplay loop flowchart with a matching player experience.
Something I also realized after finishing the minute-by-minute is that this will be a very logical way to adapt user stories into player experiences for the game. Next sprint, my plan is to try this intentionally and see if this workflow is helping or hindering the team.
Design Workflow
Speaking about workflow, this minute-by-minute actually fits pretty well into a workflow I intend to try out with our next prototype. Below is the flow as well as the details as to what I am doing in each node.
This flowchart is a good guideline as of now, but there are definitely some issues. First, this is a workflow meant for what I can do. It currently does not work with how the artist is involved and programmer gets involved in two steps, and it could definitely be better than that. Additionally, this is good for first prototypes and early actualization of concepts, but there needs to be changes for what the design process will be once we hone in on one prototype.
QA
This week, the programmer took the task of creating the build, while I focused on the Minute-By-Minute. While this was effective for learning my own process in design, it seems that the team agrees that I should work on the next prototype while our programmer tackles some of the larger systems in the game. Either way, QA seemed to go well. The intent of our test was to make sure that the initial game concept was good and that players feel some sort of tension while playing. We found that the difficulty was a little on harder side, but most players were replaying the build more than once and had some good suggestions for future iterations of this concept. A majority of the testers are excited for the game, I would say the prototype was a solid proof of concept.
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