GameIdeas.org

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.

1. World map: Select the vineyard you want to manage (if you just have one, that step is automatically skipped)
2. Overall view of the vineyard: You select the main building to enter it
3. 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.
4. 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.

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