YUNA

A Story-Driven Platformer

VIDEO GAME + UX PROCESS

Yuna is a selfless traveler, giving to the point of foolishness. Join her on a journey as she attempts to save everyone she meets.

Do not let her lose everything.

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BRACKEY’S GAME JAM SUBMISSION

UX PROCESS

USERS: Participants in Brackeys Game Jam

MY ROLE: UX, Game Design, Visual Design, Art Direction, Character Design, Prototyping

PROJECT DURATION: Three weeks

TOOLS USED: UXPressia, Unity, Illustrator, Photoshop, LucidChart

CONTEXT

This project aimed to serve two purposes, creating a UX project and participating in Brackeys 5th game jam to get reviews from other players around the world. The approaches taken are based on my understanding and observations and should not be taken as definitive.

Feedback is highly appreciated. Please reach out via the contact page to point out improvements or have a discussion. Your feedback helps me grow and improve.

Some of the approaches are taken purely for UX practice and may not be the best way to go about designing a game during a short game jam.

DESIGN CRITERIA

I had certain criteria in mind.

Adhering to the theme of Brackey’s Game Jam: Stronger Together.
Making a game that the jammers would find novel and authentic.
Including unique mechanics that provide new UX challenges.
Beautiful visuals that are minimal but with a central focus or element that instantly captures attention, preferably with an iconic character.
Puzzles in two dimensions - I am passionate about pushing boundaries in my craft. This spurred the idea of a game that requires utilizing both 2D and 3D views to solve them.

THE INSPIRATION

During an anime session at 2am, I came across a small tale with a unique art style in Fruits Basket. The tale served as an inspiration for my next game.

In the original traveler’s tale in Fruit Basket, we hear the story of a selfless girl who derived happiness from helping those in need. Other traveler’s would trick her into giving them her belongings by pretending to be in need. Eventually the girl loses everything she has. Even then, she isn’t left alone and is tricked by demons into giving away her limbs and body. She dies happy and grateful to have helped so many.

I was inspired by the tale's ability to make the viewer feel heavy and feel love for the girl despite her foolishness. I wanted to recreate this feeling but also provide the character a fighting chance that makes her admirable.

MY TWIST ON THE IDEA

I started playing around with the idea of a fragile female lead, that starts out as foolish but grows to learn that helping others doesn’t have to come at a cost, and a lack of self-preservation would not only lead to her own ruin, but also render her incapable of helping as many as possible. The idea was to introduce an easy-to-implement mechanic that is engaging and communicates the message of working together to become stronger.

BRAINSTORMING

I joined the game jam with my friend Hammad Aamer, who served as secondary game developer and someone to bounce ideas with. We were jamming remotely cities apart so our brainstorming session took place on a video call using a collaboration tool we had used before. The two main ideas that emerged were:

Introducing a companion character to fight with
Helping the enemies work together to become stronger.

At the end, we shortlisted notes and highlighted the ideas we liked in pink. The process was easy since we already had a character and setting.

CONCEPT

We decided to go with the second concept of the main character helping other travelers work together to make trades. I sketched out a few concepts for the trading mechanism.

The first setting we were interested in was a top-down view. Enemies arrived on levitating platforms and tried to connect with our path. Every enemy had a color they had and a color they needed, indicated by dialogs. The player would be saved by helping them make a trade by connecting them with a line. The gameplay was kept intentionally very simple to play since I wanted players to play the game till the end and complete the story instead of jammers getting stuck in puzzles, getting impatient and moving on to the next game. In a jam that would get thousands of submissions and many hard puzzles and mechanics, it was more important for me to provide a meaningful and memorable experience.

I chose the camera view as a 2D platformer. This would enable me to form puzzles that look purely 2D, making the 3D view come as a surprise when it was introduced.

rESEARCH

Target Users

The target users for this game were participants in Brackey’s game jam. Since they were all creating games, they would have access to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. A build would be required for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The game would be visible on the submission feed as a small thumbnail, this would require submitting it with a cover image that pops, preferably a gif.

The game jam had over 10,000 participants and over 1900 submitted games which provided lots of opportunity for testing.

SIMILAR EXPERIENCES

I started looking for similar games that involve solving puzzles in two dimensions for reference and research purposes. It was an obscure topic. Quite a few games involved changing perspectives but few utilized different views as a means of solving puzzles or accomplishing a task. Two games that stood out as reference were Meikagure and Fez.

I came across many games that involved making trades, particularly in the hypercasual genre but since the complexity of the puzzle was not under research for this exercise, I marked these for future reference.

GAME DESIGN

The games design was inspired by:

Child of Light - Served as a reference for the main character and dialogs. Yuna was largely inspired by Aurora.

Hades - A unique rogue-like action game. Served as reference for story-telling and dialogs.

Katana Zero - A 2D action platformer that stands out in its ability to engage and immerse players in its world.

UNITY PROTOTYPES

At this stage I set up a few prototypes in Unity consisting of basic objects and jumped on call with my teammate to discuss potential mechanics. The two main features we wanted to test were:

Trading Mechanism
2D to 3D transition

The goal was to come up with a way to connect enemies in 2D, in a way that utilizes their placement in 3D.

We came up with different prototypes and pitched them to friends for feedback on the core functionality and picked the mechanic most interesting to the players.

VISUAL DESIGN

The visual design is heavily inspired by my first and only snow trip to Murree. The snowflakes against my sweater seemed to be snuggled against me and I new this was a feeling I wanted to recreate.

I researched different art styles to develop the right look and feel. Media that served as a primary reference was the tale of the foolish traveler in Fruits Basket, Gris, Sky: Children of the Light and Child of Light.

CHARACTER DESIGN

Characters are often a central part of my work. It was important that players connected with Yuna. That she was easy to remember and talk about. The idea was to have her remembered as “the girl with flowing hair”. It would be enough for people to start a conversation and this would be a strong point. Yuna needed to have the potential to be instantly recognizable in a sea of games.

WHY YUNA?

Yuna is a japanese name that means “Kindness”.

Now, I can pretend that this was completely intentional, but Yuna was just the first name that popped into my head!

SWITCHING DIMENSIONS

CHALLENGES

NOVELTY

Provide a new and enjoyable experience that jammers genuinely want to play.

PUZZLES IN 2D AND 3D

Create a simple puzzle for jammers involving usage of 2D and 3D perspective to make trades between travelers.

SEAMLESS TRANSITION BETWEEN VIEWS

Create an immersive and believable transition between views that leaves the users surprised.

RETENTION

Making the puzzles easy enough that players reach the end of the story without getting bored.

RELAXATION

Provide a relaxing gameplay that sucks the user into the journey.

CONSTRAINTS

The travelers will be represented by cubes for simplicity.
Every traveler will have an interior color indicating what they have to give.

GAME FLOW

I started by sketching out a high-level overview of when and how a transition is triggered and discussing it with my team. I mapped the emotional reaction of the player as well. Then I expanded the rough sketch into a journey map to understand and improve player experience.