He From THe Pines
Summary + info
He From The Pines was developed as part of a school project over the course of 7 weeks by a team of 12 people.
My role, as game and UI Designer was to create a fun and rewarding experience for the player while preserving the theme of the game in menus
Below is a simple timeline of important design decisions during the project.
Brainstorming
The theme that was assigned was “once upon a time”. We quickly landed on old Swedish fairy-tale/mythology from that, original plan was to make something similar to EVOLVE and Väsen. But unfortunately a big concern for us was overscoping so decided to instead only have one enemy.
Development
Designing
We decided that we were going to have a game with a single enemy where the goal was to get as close as possible to take a picture without being noticed. My job then was to decide how that enemy was going to act. I wanted the player to intuitively know how to sneak around the monster to eliminate frustration.
The design was that the monster had two detection areas, one in an area around them and one to where noise was coming from. If they overlap over the player then the monster would detect them. To help we originally had the monster have a red spotlight where they were looking.
User iNTERFACE
I wanted the user interface to be diegetic and since the theme was fairy-tales, a book menu was only natural.
Quite a lot of different designs were tested, which included bookmarks, the book being slightly rotated, other fonts but was scrapped in favour of a simple and intuitive design.
In the end I wish more features had time to be added so the UI design in the book could really glow. But for the time we had I am satisfied with the results.
