Exercise: The Elements of Cheese or Font
Elements
Thumbnail Sketches:
Size, Color, and Type Thumbnail Sketches:
Beautiful Game Analysis: The Sims Freeplay
I find that this phone-friendly version of the sims is beautifully designed.
Despite having to fit a great level of detail into a small screen, the designers are able to create realistic characters, furniture, and buildings. Not only are they realistic, but they are also visually appealing, and incorporate a variety of different interior design styles in the furniture, doors, windows, and floorings that are used to decorate the houses. This motivates the player to want to purchase different pieces to build the houses for their sims, which they can shape to their own taste with a great variety of options.
Not only are they able to incorporate a great level of detail, but they are also able to transmit a large amount of information without blocking the main view of the sims world or making the screen look cluttered. Instead, by keeping the tabs containing the information at the bottom of the screen and organized symmetrically, they are able to incorporate this contextual information without making the player feel overwhelmed with information or making it hard for the player to find the information they need at any point.
The use of color is also very important. For the boxes that track what sim is being used and what action the player wants to perform the palette is light green and blue. two colors that are very close in the color gradient and therefore have low contrast. These colors mesh well with the colors in the background and therefore don’t stand out, allowing the player to see past them as long as they are not interacting with these buttons and focus on the main sims world.
In this way, with a combination of proximity and color choice, they make the information easily accessible and easy to find, without it taking from the main scene. Overall, by including beautiful details in the sims characters and in their houses, they make the game appealing and motivate the player to want to create new houses and people to live in them. Even though they have limited space, they are able to transmit a large amount of information and complexity without overwhelming the player or making the game environment feel full of distracting information.
