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From the beginning of development, our team knew that the biggest selling point of our game would be the character-switching. However, because there were few games we could find which had a similar system to ours, my greatest challenge was designing an interface that would communicate to users what characters and abilities were available to them. In addition, there was also a need to define a way to balance this UI alongside other elements that were important for goal progression, including player health points & zeal (the game's equivalent to mana points).

Below are explorations I made on Figma so that I would be able to receive feedback from my teammates in real time. We then used these drafts as a starting point for our user testing process.

Explorations of possible interface designs, done on Figma. The first image was selected for the earliest version of the game, as it grouped player status and abilities closest together.

At the same time where I was creating our assets, our team conducted over 15 play testing sessions to collect feedback and observations regarding our design decisions. My role during this process was to organize and host 13 of these sessions; some of the tasks I also completed were defining the key design questions to be answered, and analyzing observations and feedback to understand what was missing from our game.

Photo example of a user test setup.

During user tests, we took an approach where our team did not provide any verbal instructions unless absolutely necessary, to determine the efficiency of the game's UI and tutorial. Additionally, we asked each play tester to “think out loud”, so that we would be able to write down their thoughts or complaints in real time. The most frequently observed pain points were synthesized by me and used as guiding points as I became involved in coding our player interactions.

On top of designing the UI, I was also developed every visual asset, a fraction of which included, 8 character designs, 40+ player and enemy sprite animations, 5 background illustrations, a few obstacles, 12 dialogue portraits, a title logo, and special effects. When handing off sprite sheets to my teammates, I ensured that I included animated GIFs to communicate how I envisioned the animations to play.

Concept art which would serve as reference for the animated sprites.

An example of a set of sprite sheets that were handed off to my teammates.

An example of a set of GIFs to communicate what the animations should look like in-game.

The biggest challenge during this process was to successfully leverage my time so that I could create a vast number of assets, without compromising my other course projects or the quality of the assets. In order to accomplish this, I scheduled a few hours before I slept each night as time to create at least one animated sprite. This method helped me with not only giving myself ample time to finish the visual assets, but also in developing a streamlined process that helped me maximize the time I had for animating.

A few examples of other spritesheets that were made for the game.