Pocket Vineyard — Day 5: Interface & Visuals
November 3rd, 2006 by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau
So far I’ve talked about this game in very abstract ways. The gameplay is fairly well defined from a high and low-level point of view, but the presentation of the game on the screens isn’t clear.
That’s what I want to cover today: the interface and the look & feel of the game.
Interface
The Nintendo DS is a special challenge when it comes to interface design because of its two screens. Even if everything would work great in a single screen, you can’t just leave the other one empty. A popular approach is to put information in one screen and gameplay in the other — that’s the approach I’ll use here.
The top screen will contain the status and other needed information. That’s where you’ll check to see if everything is going well. Characters will also appear in this screen to help you with various aspects of vineyard management — they’re the tutorial and hint feature of the game.
The bottom screen is where all interactions are done using the touch screen. You do the different actions by clicking on objects around the vineyard. For example, from the highest level to managing the aging of the wine, you’d go through the following steps.
- World map: Select the vineyard you want to manage (if you just have one, that step is automatically skipped)
- Overall view of the vineyard: You select the main building to enter it
- Interior of the main building: That’s where all the tools to manage the fermentation of the wine are located. You select the oak barrels where the wine ages.
- Barrels: That’s where you get the information about the aging process: temperature, characteristics of the wine, etc. You can also do the actions related to the aging here.
For each action, you have two options: you can queue them for automatic completion or do them manually. The former is the fastest method. If you’re short on time one day, you can automate all the tasks to save time. The manual method involves playing a mini-game for each action you decide to do manually. Doing it this way takes more time, but results in a superior wine at the end.
Look & Feel
The movie “A Good Year” — about a vineyard — has the type of ambiance I’d like for that game; go watch the trailer to see what I mean. Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
Back? Ok, so you saw the relaxing and old-fashioned ambiance of the vineyard in the movie. There’s a lot of nature, everything is in soft colors and the lighting makes it look like it’s always early morning. This rustic decor is exactly what I want for this game — this ambiance is the dream of every stressed worker.
The graphics would be 2D — low-polygon 3D graphics wouldn’t fit the mood of this game at all. I’d like them to look like paintings, not entirely realistic but not cartoony either. Characters would be drawn in a Franco-Belgian comics style, with a lot of personality.
The overall look and feel should be relaxed and shouldn’t give players any feeling of urgency. They come to this game to unstress, so let’s give them a dream-like setting.
Wrapping it Up
So that’s it with this project. It was a very challenging theme and I wish I spent a bit more time on it — I still feel there are loose ends that would need some work. Still, I think this game could be a hit if handled properly — it’s the type of game that can reach older people who don’t play much. It would obviously be a risk though, there aren’t many precedent to indicate how well this could sell.
This exercise definitely raised my confidence as a designer. I mean, if I can make a game about wine, I can handle just about anything. That game concept isn’t perfect (not nearly, actually), but it showed me that you can find an interesting gameplay angle even when a theme doesn’t feel game-like. It pushed back my limits about what I consider appropriate for games.
So, don’t hesitate to post in the comments if you have any comments, questions or if you simply want to tell me I’m an arrogant bastard to think I can handle anything design-wise… And don’t forget to come back on Monday when I tackle something entirely different.
“I mean, if I can make a game about wine, I can handle just about anything.”
Don’t forget that you haven’t actually made the game - just the pitch. Some would say that this is the easiest part
But then again it’s probably also the most interesting part to hear about, so do continue.
Yeah, I meant “design a game about wine” instead of make. Obviously that’s easier than doing the whole thing, but it’s an important start and it’s what I’m working on on this site
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From this level of detail, I’m confident I wouldn’t have too many problems with the rest of the design. There’s a lot left to detail, but it’s less critical and challenging stuff. So, design-wise, I’m more confident in myself — production is a different matter
Just another note to say I disagree that the initial conception work (essentially what the pitch is) is the easiest part of making a game. That belief seems popular in the gaming industry, but it’s completely wrong: conception is easy only if you don’t care about its quality.
Saying conception is the easiest part of making a game is like saying writing the scenario for a movie is the easiest part of making it — it’s not. While anybody can write a crappy story, writing a great story requires a lot of skill and work. Likewise, anybody can come up with crappy me-too designs, but great game concepts require a lot of skill and work.
I read the description of some games and I know from the first paragraph that the game isn’t worth my time: the game sounds derivative and uninteresting. That’s bad design work, yet it’s everywhere.
While a good design isn’t a guarantee of a great game (it’s just the first step), a bad design makes it very unlikely that the game will be any good. I’m amazed at the number of publishers who green-light projects that start with an awful design. They’d save a ton of money (I’m talking millions here) if they’d hire a designer who knew his stuff and gave him the time and resources to do his job correctly.
Sorry for the rant, but I’m annoyed at the lack of respect for the role of initially designing the game. Nobody doubts that being a programmer or artist requires a lot of skill, yet everybody thinks the job of design is easy and that anybody can do it. There’s more to making a great game than copying somebody else’s work but with better graphics — I wish more people would realize that…
dog picture puggle…
Value source for dog picture puggle….