Screwed
My work as the UI/UX designer on the indie exploratory puzzle game “Screwed”.
Animated Collection Graphics
Because a the objective of the game was to collect various plane pieces, I knew the collection animations needed to be fun and fulfilling. As such, I animated the colored 3D object onto the flat blueprint image.
HUD Elements
To fit with the “building” theme, and to subtly remind the player about the game’s objectives, I decided to use a blueprint theme for a majority of the HUD elements. Because this game is a 3D exploration puzzle game, I didn’t want to clutter the screen up with too much information, so I elected to only use a small circular collection meter for the upper right hand corner of the screen.
Control Screens
Above are the two final control screens. To match with the blueprint/construction theme I put these on graph paper. The white of the graph paper worked better visually against the richer colors of the game’s environment and helped break up some of the monotony of the colors while keeping in theme. I used orange to make the controls pop, especially against the blue elements, and to match the tutorial popups. I tested these control screens amongst people and changed the font size to be bigger and the various arrow colors to be a brighter orange so people with visual disabilities could see better.
Above are the initial control screen diagrams. Near the first half of development I made the visual theme more inline with the kitchen it was set in, which while not bad, did not have the benefit of tying into the game’s objective theme-wise. These initial diagrams were also marginally difficult to read, with minimal variation to color to communicate which buttons to press. The white arrows were not super visible either and players often didn’t see them or had a hard time following them. Overall these initial diagrams were muddled and confusing for players.
Animated Tutorial Popups
As I conducted user testing something that jumped out to me and the rest of the development team was how difficult it was for people to learn the controls. The difficulty stemmed from:
1. The uniqueness of the game concept (there was no referencepoint to what controls to press to screw into an object or launch yourself as a screw).
2. The amount of controls.
3. Some controls were multistep instead of a single button.
As such, I determined that I’d need to animate visual popups to demonstrate the controls to the player as the player needed to use the control.