Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags

Anyone looking for design work? User flows, wireframes, UI, etc?

A topic by Clifton B created May 21, 2016 Views: 548 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 3
(+1)

I'd like to help anyone who's got a game tool in mind, but wants to make sure all the steps are accounted for and the interactions are sorted out before diving into the programming and realizing something hadn't been considered. And I can do some visual design work as well, maybe some icons and other UI bits if needed.

I've designed a few level & puzzle design tools so far, and I've been doing UX research & design since I was your age. I mean, maybe. Kinda depends on how old you are.

Let me know if you'd like some help!

Host (1 edit)

I'm working on a tool that will take a photo of a level design sketched on paper, and convert that to usable digital data. Inspired by seeing students and game designers with cool designs all over their desks, I'd like to bring the unique advantages of hand-drawn and digital design together.

Here's the bootstrap of the project (a lot of this is me learning OpenCV): https://imgur.com/a/V3rng

Further down the line I'll definitely need some usability testing, along with people throwing their sketches at the system to see what breaks.


(I'm a shit level designer, that much should be obvious from the test level, that's also part of why I'm doing this)

Nice! I've done a bit with mobile apps that used barcode scanners and whatnot, which isn't really the same, but I've got an idea of how this would work for users. No idea how it'd work behind the scenes, but I think I can come up with something for this.

Host (1 edit)

Well, it uses OpenCV and Python currently, which are hardly easy to set up. So it'll either be a webapp (do the processing server-side), or I'll need to reimplement it or repackage it to make it a simple, cross-platform install.

The theory is quite similar to a QR Code scanner, looking for salient aspects of an image and deriving data from that.

How do you imagine the photo will be uploaded? If it's a web app, I assume most people would take photos first, then upload to the site?

I'm also wondering if there would be different types of level designs, so users would choose platformer, dungeon, etc to help the system read the scans properly.

Host

For the photo process, there could probably be multiple vectors, drag onto page, browse, open camera, etc... The API should be made in such a way that other frontends could be built, like native apps or an interface directly in Unity.

For the different types of level, I'm more worried about the representation rather than the game genre. Right now it only knows about lines, which can be used to describe a system of walls, floors or outlines. It'd be nice to be able to tag the polygons in between the lines through colour-coding (here is lava, for instance). A tile-based representation could be cool too (need to drop by the shop and buy some felt-tip pens to test this)

Would you think the system would just interpret the scan in terms of simple line objects, then let the user tweak each line accordingly? I wonder if it would speed up the process, and make it seem a bit more magic, if you could say "I want to make a platformer," and then all the lines are interpreted as floors. If you say "Let's build a dungeon crawler," it changes to top-down mode and lines are all walls. In fact, for a simple proof of concept, that's probably as much as I'd recommend building right there, and adding more functionality to it later. Still, it's worth throwing all sorts of ideas out there.

Host

My point is that walls & floors are the same thing, from a computer vision standpoint, so the selecting the game type wouldn't help the interpreter in any way.

(+1)

Hey, sorry I kinda disappeared. Left my job last week so I've been a little more concerned with finding another way to find money that usual. Are you still working on the level creation tool?