My UX work on Cobble and Trouble
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GAME PRESENTATION
Cobble & Trouble is a first-person action game. You, as a witch, can use magical, telekinetic powers to create chaos, fend-off enemies, and craft an army of golems that fight for you. Each object has properties that will directly influence the golem, or add magic powers. Combine them, plan your defences and shoot at anything that tries to touch your forge!
As an apprentice witch, you are tasked to watch the Forge of your Master, a whimsical place of chaos and power. Everything is going well when suddenly, a hord of ice creatures break the door and try to destroy the source of your power. To defend it, you can count on your magic and build your own army with the objects that surround you. Fight the waves and survive with your golems to protect the Forge!
Cobble and Trouble is my second-year project at ENJMIN (French public Master Degree Games and Interactive Digital Medi). I build this game with 11 other students, my role on the team was fully focused around building the best player experience. On this project, I worked as a UX designer, UI designer, UI artist, Game User Researcher and UI Integrator.
Identifying the target
You can find a detailed blog post about this part here.
The target we desired to aim was discussed and debated with the 2 producers of the team, around that we build personal based on online datas.
SIGNS AND FEEDBACKS
Benchmark
Aside from the game design team, a benchmark document was built. In this document, I was specifically focusing on Signs and feedbacks on other action FPS and manipulation game.
Design a proposition
Even with a waterfall organisation on our project, we tried to have multiple iterations on Signs and Feedbacks. Here is a proposition specifically around damage feedbacks.
I design with the game designer and the VFX artist the others signs and feedbacks after each feature and change on the game.
This led to use of VFX and SFX on the game for damage feedbacks (and forge damage feedbacks) like shown here at the top:
We choose to add trails to the projectile to increase the game feel of the projectile and have clarity in the shot information
PLAYTESTING
A first playtest was made around player comprehension of the 3C and the core gameplay. You can find the detailed report here.
This led us to discuss with the team which decisions we wanted to make.
CONTROLS
The game is a PC FPS game the decision was made to build controls around PC standard. We mainly iterate controls with features coming in and out and team thinking.
ZQSD: Move
Spacebar: Jump
Shift: Run
Right HOLD: Magnet mode
Left CLIC: Shoot a props
E CLIC (once): Invoke golem zone / Left Clic (once): Invoke golem / Right or E CLIC (once): Cancel golem zone
BUILDING THE INTERFACE
I build a prototype of the interface on Adobe XD. Both the HUD and the Menu.
Here are some of the first iterations :
The idea was to offer possibilities to the Game Design team and open the reflections on which information we wanted to communicate to the user via the HUD.
The game is pretty visually charged, so we choose to go with as little HUD elements as needed and have HUD elements visually come out of the game in order to always be seen. We only choose to display your life, the life of your forge and the wavenumber. I have also integrated the damage VFX feedback, which is localised around your view like seen in the Signs and feedbacks part.
I fully design, create and integrated all the UI and HUD which follows.
ACCESSIBILITY
Due to the nature of the project (vertical slice), we couldn’t afford to integrate any accessibility options but for the sake of the assignments, I list all theoretical features and options which should feature in a full version of the game.
