From our last meeting, Binghao, Spencer, and I were able to go over the art scope for this project and possible changes. Spencer has been a wonderful resource for us in providing paper pattern references, which will give new light and beauty to this project.
With the power of our collective notebooks and brainpower, we were able to brainstorm several ideas, keeping other games in mind. We explored various "endless runner" games and talked about what worked best. For me, I personally enjoyed Backflip Studio's Ninjump Instruction page. But the UX flow in getting there was a tad bit confusing. For one, to locate the instructions for the game, you would have to go through options. I haven't seen many games do this, and it was not very intuitive for me as a player and designer because "Options" generally refers to settings you would like to set, as opposed to, a place to find how to play the game. Usually, those instructions are reserved for somewhere the start button, or even on the menu screen where the player can't miss it. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to play a game you don't know the rules too.
Some exceptions could be the simpler games that rely on player intuition, but there's always at least a line or command at the beginning to give a heads up to the player. Binghao made the point of have an instructional play through/tutorial at the beginning of the game as it starts. I've seen this in many web games, and this style of instruction is much more interactive and fun. However, it would be annoying to play through the tutorial every time the player wants to play the game. So the FTUE (First Time User Experience) would be unique and basically force the player to get through the tutorial, whereas the STUE (Second Time User Experience) would skip the interactive tutorial and possibly add the instructions as an optional choice via pop-up.
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| Background Art Concepts by Spencer Park |
