Short Exercise: Visual Design of Games

1. Identify elements:

  • Core Elements:
    • The text “Cheese or font?”
    • The text “Enter C or F”
    • The box for the user to enter “C” or “F”
    • The quiz prompt(cheese or font prompt)
    • The score (number of correct ones)
  • Supportive Elements:
    • Different colors indicating wrong, correct, current, not-yet, or the prompt
    • The score out of 50 updating through the game
    • The timer
    • Some cheese/font histories after the wrong guess
  • Extraneous Elements:
    • Trivial and meaningless sentences after the wrong guess
    • The average score

2. 

3.

4.

5.

6. The buttons for the user to select “C” or “F” should be grouped together because they belong to the same group, both being the interactive parts for the user to select. The “Cheese or Font” text and the prompt should be grouped together because they form on single question for the user to answer.

The score and the potential timer should be grouped together, because they both show the current game state and game information. This group needs to be separated from the previous two groups because they have different usages.

7.

The game I chose is Gorogua, which is released on Steam. I took the screenshot from the Steam official page for this game.

  • Size: As we can see, the game display is composed of four small interactive images. Some of them can be connected with each other (as shown in the screenshot, the bottom two can be connected), to generate a bigger one. Besides, within each image, it’s possible to zoom in and out, to switch the size of several objects for the puzzle solving or for connection.
  • Color and Contrast: Maybe not very obvious in this screenshot, but the color and contrast used in the game is brilliant. There are several themes, such as cold winter (blue), harvesting spring (bright green), or boiling summer (brownish yellow). There are 5 fruits to collect, each has different colors. Besides, after collecting all of the five fruits, the player needs to go over everything again, making a more clear contrast of the changes and different themes.
  • Alignment: The game layout is a 2 by 2 grid, individual or connectable.

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