In studio 3 (and later my internship), we designed an educational app with Ralf Muhlberger, CEO of The Latest Tricks and 89Friends. He was looking into creating an AR gardening app for school students to fulfils their curriculum requirements in a fresh and interesting way. We called it Project Sapling, and it was by far the most interesting project I’ve worked on. Designing an application that fulfils a curricular and experiential goal was an interesting challenge, as well as positioning the app for funding grants and prototyping with mobile devices in mind.
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Window’s device manager is an ancient tool to allow administrators to monitor hardware attached to their computer. Device manager has been around since Windows 95, and over the years its tried and true design hasn’t changed much at all. However, with Microsoft acknowledging that the present and future of UI design doesn’t promise a mouse … Continue reading Redesigning Windows’ Device Manager
This trimester, my team and I have been working with a client to product an Augmented Reality educational app for young students to learn about gardening. Over 13 weeks, we created a product for Android devices that teaches students about gardening processes and tries to engage them in and out of the classroom. The project … Continue reading Project Sapling Postmortem
As I said in my previous post, working under a client can mean that you're creating thing that you have no idea about. For us, we're making an AR educational app about gardening and garden maintenance. My team and I didn't know anything about the nitty-gritty with gardening so we had to do some proper … Continue reading Field Research – How we Found Out What We Didn’t Know
Working under people is a crucially important skill that many people don't expect to learn. As my teacher told me, commissioned work is likely the most lucrative work for a game developer, just as government funding supports the Film industry. Learning to understand the needs of a client and work toward their goals is very … Continue reading How to Take the Helm of Someone Else’s Ideas – Working Under Clients
The purpose of pre-production is to ascertain the technical and design foundation for your project. Locking down the software, hardware and design that make up your project will be instrumental when your team starts working. So, what can you research?
Where the Heart Is is a first-person "house-packing simulator" about creating your home at the various stages of your life. We exhibited the game at Brass Razoo! to positive reception. I learn a number of things over the course of this project that fall into four distinct categories: Workflow The most improved area over the … Continue reading Where the Heart Is – A Postmortem
One lesson I continue to learn the more I make games is that the idea you begin with is only an arbitrary starting position, and what your product becomes will be so different to its original incarnation, for good reason. A game without feedback and iteration is like Sherlock without Watson - capable, but missing … Continue reading Playtesting and Analytics – When to Pivot and Why
The problem with storytelling in games is that most stories are either very specific, or totally ambiguous. There's something to be said about all types of storytelling, emergent, environmental or cinematic. With Where the Heart is, we wanted to tell a story with the minimal resources we had. Like I learned at Brooke Maggs' Narrative Design … Continue reading Where the Heart Is – Constrained Storytelling
Falling is a short, music experience we created under the direction of an Audio student. Using audio they created, and a design they concocted, we create an interactive experience to bring out the most of their music. Project Management Right off the bat we tried to keep our communication channels open. We quickly established our … Continue reading Falling – A Postmortem
