EXPLOSION! EDITOR
for Rush!
The Explosion! Editor (and engine) was created by a team of 5 sophomore computer science students from DigiPen Institute of Technology Singapore. Faced with the challenge of lacking the dedicated game designers and artists to craft an artistically compelling game experience, we set out to overcome this with the development of specific tools to comfortably create our own style of game visuals.
My role: Design Lead
As Design Lead, one of the many responsibilities includes creating strong and impactful visuals for the game. To achieve this, various actions were taken to ensure our direction/vision for the game was set straight. This actions include:
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- Organising playtests through development milestones
- Observing player patterns and responses
- Analysing and understanding player feedback
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Through these actions, we were able to craft a meaningful game experience for our players.
Creating the Explosion! Editor
Before game development, we had to first create a level editor. This step was crucial as the quality of the editor determines the experience of the game developers, which translates to speed and efficiency of game development. The main steps we took to develop the level editor were:
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1. Researching editors in commercial game engines
2. Filtering research material based on priorities & needs
3. Implementing planned functionalities
4. Design editor to be easily expandable for future features
Iterative Design
After seeing real use in the development environment, more points of frustration or confusion surfaced. Thanks to the tight communication within the team, these grievances were quickly addressed.
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Existing tools were tweaked and new Quality of Life (QoL) tools created to improve the game developing experience as development progresses.
Visual Effects Tool
The Visual Effects Tool is the tool responsible for configurable visual effects simulations. The magic of all the game's visual effects start here.
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This tool features simulations for:
- Camera Manipulation
- Particle Effects
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It was designed to be incredibly configurable, allowing for developers to tweak their effects to their hearts' desire. With real-time simulation, developers can quickly find the right configuration to implement into the game script.
The Game - Rush!
With the effective use of the Explosion! Editor, my team and I created the game of our vision - one with simple geometric shapes but made visually stunning with bright colors and bold effects.
DESIGN PROCESS
User Research
Due to this being a sophomore-level project, the emphasis on user research was missed and the team launched into development before any prior planning. This mistake was only realized a few weeks in. After this, the team took a step back from development to review the engine architecture/systems design to ensure that the editor will be designed with UX in mind.
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User research was done by gathering information from all team members, such as user priorities, expectations and goals.
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The information was then visualized using a User Story Map, to keep track of user workflows as the design iterates through each development cycle.
Prototyping
Low-fidelity wireframe prototypes were created based on analyzed user research data.
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They served to provide a rough idea of how the editor's interface would look like to the rest of the team members, and got tweaked/adjusted accordingly from early first-look feedback.
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Once the look of the prototypes were satisfactory to all team members, implementation of the Explosion! Editor's GUI commenced.
Feedback & Iterations
Staying true to the prototype in the actual application implementation proved to be a challenge due to several technical limitations that I faced. Some decisions had to be made to trim features to maintain a good balance of functionality and simplicity, and time consumption.
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Regardless of how well-planned our game development was, we inevitably encountered unforeseen needs for new features/functionalities. To accommodate for these changes, the interface design has to go through multiple refinement iterations to fit the new requirements as they come.
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As the "feature creep" got bigger, there was a constant challenge to keep the editor from being too overwhelming for its users. There was constant testing and tweaking to ensure user-friendliness and intuitiveness was not compromised.
