Collaborative Design Practice

Edita Chew En Thung / 0357357

Collaborative Design Practice / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
Sugar High

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Table of Content

1. INSTRUCTIONS

2. PROCESS - PROPOSAL + IDEATION

      i. FINAL

3. REFLECTION

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INSTRUCTIONS  

We are to collaborate in groups with other module's student project to create and design their desired board/card game like they are our clients.

Thew above are the deliverables that will be expected from this module.

PROCESS

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IMPORTANT LINKS : 

MIRO

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PROPOSAL (TASK 1)

Week 1 

We chose between the 2 games of another module's project to have them designed and produced as our project, we started by drafting questions for conducting a simple survey to find out the user personas as the age range provided by our client is 13-18 yr olds and it will be hard to conduct survey to minors and have them play a board/tabletop card game of sorts.

Week 2

Continued on progress with finding elements and moodboards to kickstart the designs and have them up and running. Since no class was held, we conducted our own research and made he initial planning and theme of the game.

Week 3

After showing our progress to our lecturer, we proceeded with drafting even more logos and design wise, we have to gather all the necessary information and mood boards to fit the theme "little sugar friends" for the game Sugar High.

LOGO SKETCHES

Finalised logo

Week 4

After consulting sir about our designs, we are to finalise them and prepare for a presentation with Dr Luqman regarding our progress for the project.

PROPOSAL

We compiled our materials to put into the presentation slides.

Week 5

Dr Luqman came to access our presentation Proposal.

need to reflect to the game

don't only focus on the interview answer 

explore about the sugar structure (hexagonal) 

mascot not appealing 

card shape need to consider because of the durability

After feedback, we proceeded to refine them and proceed with designing the drafts.

PROJECT IDEATION (TASK 2) FINAL

Week 6

worked on the mascot design and overall brand identity and make the moodboard more cohesive.

Week 7

After consulting the mascot with lecturer, we have finalised the final draft for the mascot and will test the card design cut out on week 8.

Week 8

After testing the card shape design with a few users, they all mentioned that the design is plausible to play and shuffle, it's more ergonomic to them and it's a different yet unique shape. It does make users want to know more about the game if the elements of it looks interesting.

Week 9

I designed the basic template, pattern and logo placement and hand it over to my team member to place her illustrations.

Then I proceeded to change some of the elements inside to make it more legible and print ready.

I placed the self printed and cut version with a regular printer and glued it to the laser-cut cards front and back to make a simple lo-fi mockup of he 4 different types of designs: sabotage, advantage, star and bonus cards.

Then the rest are to finish their parts that were assigned to them while I did the resource counter and sizing while planning the placement of the items that were going into the box/packaging.

The materials, planning and ideation with executing were done/determined by me.

Week 10

I designed the packaging and the dieline.

My group went to the printing shop and discussed on the materials and what would work and not work for the following designs for the game we have designed for. Handpicking and nitpicking were done until deciding on which to use within the restraints against our budget and time.

I bought the materials for the stars, and foam for the box inside as well.

After having the dieline done by Lizzie, I further designed the packaging box to make the information on it more fuller and engaging for younger audiences. And then the design was tweaked slightly by lizzie to make it more pop.

Week 11

I had done the purchasing and determining the materials for the packaging and assets with my groupmates.

Week 12

After diecut/lasercutting the star pieces, I also manually cut the foam before the day of presenting to Dr Luqman.

After presentation, there were comments from dr luqman about the design that needs to be addressed.

FINAL SLIDES

LINK TO CLIENT PRESENTATION VIDEO + GAMEPLAY = HERE

ALL FILES/MATERIALS = HERE

REFLECTION

At the first stage of the collaboration with Game Studies cohort on the project Sugar High, I saw a clear difference in priorities where I was more interested in the visuality of the project and the need to make the glucose and ATP illustrations attractive to our target demographic of 13-21 years old, whereas the Game Studies students were more concerned with mechanics and the core loop. This early tension came at the cost of ideas that were intuitive biologically not always translating to enjoyable play and our aesthetic decisions interfering with the probability balancing requirements of the cards. I observed that we were in effect communicating in two different languages one visual and one systemic and this led to an initial prototyping where rules could easily be abused due to the fact that we were overly preoccupied with the narrative than the playability.

My key discovery during the iterative design process was that mechanics have to come first before aesthetics; we realized the pitfall of chocolate-covered broccoli was avoided by having the gameplay itself explain the concepts of biology (such as discarding cards to simulate the release of energy) instead of simply writing down the material on a board. We discovered that the best tool to reduce the communication gap between us was the visual aid and the flowcharts, as these helped to effectively communicate our user interface objectives and us comprehend the rules of the Game Studies team. Most importantly the partnership showed that to keep the teenage audience engaged, the game had to be quick and minimalistic with the visualism being used to make the academic information feel cool as opposed to textbook-heavy.

To sum up, the redesigning of "Sugar High" proved that the successful design is negotiated process and not a one-man activity and I had to come out of my "graphic design silo" and consider the product as a functional system. I have studied that taking into consideration the Game Studies knowledge in the field of game balance allowed the final visual image to become more powerful because now the artworks go in line with the mechanics, not contradicting them. In the future, I will be utilizing this functional-first approach to new projects whereby my visual solutions would in all ways resolve the fundamental user issues as opposed to having an ornamental role.