RESEARCH
To kickoff the research and design process, I met with the product owner to hear her vision for the hidden object game. She wanted a hidden object game that wouldn’t be a heavy lift on the smaller art team. This game would not require constant new designs of intricate interior scenes and objects. After our quick discussion, I dove into some competitive research to see what kind of hidden object games were currently on the market, and how we could do something a little different.
We wanted to steer away from complex room scenes (left image). Started looking into other object searching games on the market.
WIREFRAMES
After sharing my findings with the product owner, we found that we were interested in the hidden object style, in the above right images. The use of color, scale, and proximity as ways of hiding objects seemed like an interesting direction to explore further. Using Miro, we moved forward with lo-fidelity wireframing to work through the mechanics of the game.
Left: We tried different ways of presenting to players what objects they should be looking for. Right: we moved forward with the visual display of the objects to search for…liked how it worked almost like a bingo game.
DESIGN
We decided to move forward with a game that functioned similar to a bingo game. There would be a line of objects present, that the player would need to find in the below grid. As pieces were discovered, they would be greyed out. The object of the game was to find the pieces as quickly as you can before the timer runs out, then move onto the next round. There could be a certain amount of rounds that the player could try to complete. What was appealing about this style of hidden object game was that we could create an asset library of objects, and the game would place them randomly along the grid.
Once the functionality of the game was figured out, the game producer wrote a quick one-sheet GDD for us to share with our Unity developer. While this was happening, I started in on building the grid system and creating the design style for the asset library, using Photoshop and Sketch. We really liked the vintage market theme. Each round could have its own theme of objects, like camping or sailing.
For our grid system, we created assets sizes of 1x1, 1x2, 1x3 and 2x2
CREATED MICRO-ANIMATIONS: To better help explain how the game could work, I created a couple of rough animations using Principle.
Also, created a spec sheet with annotations for the developer to reference.
FINAL DESIGNS
With a super tight timeline of only a couple of days, we were only able to create the start screen and mocks for two rounds. Below are those designs.
OUTCOME
The Hidden Object game ended up coming in second place! It was added to the list of games for development in the future.