Albert Cayuela Naval

At the beginning of the project I did a research about the ways that could make the players of our game feel the sense of cooperation and competitivity between them.

I proposed to the team the ways in which we could design our game in order to achieve the goal mentioned above:

Comfort cooperation design:

We do not have level design barriers, a player can theoretically finish the level alone.

Class cooperation design:

More than one player is needed to finish the level.

Mechanics in cooperation:

Use game mechanics in order to make players cooperate, those can be cooperative abilities, non cooperative abilities that work well together, level cooperative mechanics or combat cooperative mechanics.

Competition:

It helps to create a fun environment while playing but it can also be a double-edged sword, players can have a bad experience (bad environment).

As I explained before, my main work in this project was all the user interface design of the game, including menu screens and HUD. In order to do that, I used a routine of work that permitted me to achieve the best result possible for every task I had to do.

How did I work?

References research:

My first step to design something was always finding references that could be used for our game.

Design:

When I have got the idea of what was needed and how could we do it, I made the first design of it and explained it with a written document and a representative image of it.

Iterate:

After presenting the design to my teammates and the lead, and receiving feedback from them, I iterated my previous design as many times as needed in order to get a good final result.

What did I do?

Main menu

Since the beginning of the project we wanted to have a not boring UI in our game, and that meant a non static UI. On top of that, we decided to have something dynamic in the main menu, we decided to make the menu with a 3D scene and not with 2D art. We added humor too, making Gerald have a hot bath in front of all of us. When it comes to buttons we took the decision of giving a special importance to us, since this is a project to have a working background we put two buttons to promote ourselves, these are the "credits" button which brings you our credits scene and the Team button, which brings you to our GitHub repository.

Pause Menu

For every in-game menu, we decided that it was important to make players feel like they are in the middle of a game even though it was paused. The fact that they know in every moment in what point they left the game when they paused was a must for me as a designer. In order to achieve this, we decided to let the current game frame be the background of the screen when the game was paused. When it comes to buttons, we thought that it was interesting to leave the "Main menu" and the "Exit Game" buttons on the bottom of the screen, giving them less importance than others have in order to keep the players in the game.

Score screen

One of the problems that we found during the development of the project was that we found the score screen too boring, we had really static information and it did not give any positive nor negative feedback to the players. In order to fix this, we thought about making it simple when it comes to information, but turning it into a more dynamic and fun screen which added competitive feeling between the players.

Other menus

Besides the three screens previously described I also designed these three: controls screen, settings screen and credits screen.

HUD

The objective we sought to achieve during all the project when it comes to HUD was making it look a part of the game and to give the correct information to the players and make it in the correct way. At the same time it has been a challenge finding the way to make it have a lot of importance, but at the same time not bothering the players while they are playing.