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PROJECT : Call of Lowland
ROLE : UX & UI Designer
DURATION : 72 Hours
Project Overview
The game features a time manipulation mechanic that allows players to take additional actions per turn or travel back to previous states of the board. Each character has different strengths and weaknesses that must be taken into account when building a strategy.
Contribution
UX Designer
Game Ideation
Game Designer
UI Designer & Artist​
Quality Assurance Tester
Prompt
“A war game where you explore underwater cities over a few thousand years.”
Generated at: https://orteil.dashnet.org/gamegen
Brainstorming
Our prompt left a lot of room for interpretation which challenge us as a team to cohesively form a gameplay loop that adheres to genre conventions and explores the prompt we generated.
Core Mechanic Diagram
Iteration & Scoping
Our goal was to have the player traverse a world map in a limited amount of turns, encountering enemies as they make their way to the top of the board to defeat the Boss. Each battle would earn them a "Time Travel Glass" which would help in the upcoming boss fight.
We soon realized our initial concept had to be scoped down due to our deadline and we iterated on inculpating the Time travel more heavily into core combat.
Cut content
- World Map Exploration
- Chasing after the Big Boss
- Time Travel Nodes/Beacon
- Repopulating Enemies
Scope Down
Initial Game Loop
Combat
Shifting our focus entirely to combat we had ample time to develop a simple yet effective combat system. We further defined the game state rules such as party size, turn order, secondary mechanic etc.
Key design decisions
Party of 3 on a 3 x 6 Grid
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Initiative Based (each battle has unique turn order, player wins ties).
HP Carries over between battles.
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‘Bookmark’ each cycle
Player can spend Hourglasses to return to bookmarks.
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Once every unit moves, a new
cycle begins.
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After [x] Battles, reach final boss, defeat final boss within cycle count.
Combat Screen
Unit Numbers
All units we're then assigned stat values to determine their soft roles and help to rationalize combat encounters. Values were kept small as to be more digestible and easier to iterate upon after playtesting sessions.
Unit Stat Sheets
UI Implementation
Once we're satisfied with our mechanics my role shifted to UI & UX. My goal was simple, compliment the established visual style while being able to present relevant information to players in a non-obtuse fashion.
Grey Box Mock
The process started with identifying key points of information on the HUD. Then once listed out, I blocked in elements in a greybox layout, iterating on placement and composition.
High-fi Mock
After a brief meeting with the UI programmer in which we discussed the sequence in which elements would reveal themselves and when, I drafted a list of animations and moved onto High Fidelity Assets.
Once UI was implemented we spent our few remaining hours fleshing out the narrative and lore side of the game and tweaked a few values for balancing.
Key take away
THANK YOU
Lets create together! Feel free to reach out to me stevierayca@gmail.com
The Team
Stevie Ray HUNTER
Carsten BOOTH
Xinran MA
Benjamin M-DAVISON
Avery AUGUSTO
This project really helped to reinforce the importance of scope. Due to our short time line we had to quickly identify the core of our game and build outwards around it. Along with working completely remote from start to finish.
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