Day 7 — Settings
My design for a settings menu in a mobile game
Finding a Direction
It took me a while to figure out a direction for this project. I eventually landed on the idea of a settings page for a video game — something I’m intimately familiar with. I was initially thinking in terms of traditional, large scale video games but ended up switching focus to a simpler mobile game. I’ve had an idea rolling around my head for a mobile game I want to make, so I figured I could design a settings page based on that idea.
Features
Having played a decent amount of mobile games, one thing that I often find myself wanting is a simple mute switch. There are times I don’t want any audio and am forced to adjust the various volume sliders down to their lowest setting. However, if the next time I open that game I’m interested in hearing the sound, I again have to manually adjust the sliders. The mute switch alleviates some of this tedium by turning off all sound when checked and restoring previous volume settings when unchecked.
Accessibility is also a concern of mine. I know multiple people with colorblindness for whom some games are simply unplayable. It was important for me to include a colorblind option to address these situations.
Lastly, I included a link to the developer’s website. I consider this a nice-to-have since most mobile games are very self-contained. Sometimes I’m interested in learning more about a game’s updates or the developer itself, so having an easily accessible link is appreciated.
Post Mortem
For this project, I wanted to challenge myself to create something as quickly as possible. I feel the overall quality is a bit lower than my other designs, but I also spent 1/3 of the time on it, which may have been a worthy tradeoff.
Working quickly left me open to forgetting things. Namely, I initially forgot to include any sort of Back or Close button. I’m also not pleased with the overall color scheme, though I like the gradient on my ‘Visit Developer’s Site’ button. (reading that button text now makes me feel like I could have worded it better — another casualty of rushing my design)