Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 1, Every Pixel a Message
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The First weeks of Scrum has passed. What have we accomplished? Hidden storytelling in design.  Not actual picture from the game. But it looks nice!
Design
The first weeks has passed and Magic Writer is coming along fine.
As the lead designer on the project my first main task is writing the design document, which turns out to be much more work than anticipated. But that part is coming along fine ever since we allocated time for me to do it.
For this blog post I’m going to pic one artifact I’ve been working on and give some insight on my decisions regarding it’s design. Inspired from the “Every Frame a Painting” Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting), I tried to get creative. This blog’s artifact: How to tell the story/setting in magic writer. Storytelling through backgrounds Since Magic Writer’s gameplay is very focus intensive (spelling words does that). it becomes hard to implement story into the gameplay. So we’re looking for different ways to create the sense of a story in the game.  Picture from concept document
Moving the Story
Magic Writer is the story of a wizard trying to save a beach from invading monsters. The monsters (like the ones in the picture) convey the enemies. The wizard conjuring the items shows off the defender of the beach.
But we have currently have no way of representing the people being saved at the beach. Our goal for this time is finding ways to show the people being saved. Let’s start looking for ways to include them. The Main Menu
We have a place the player visits at least once before starting the main game. The main menu! We have a lot of options, but I want to keep it simple but effective.
 Mockup of the main menu
The background image can convey the situation with a picture. In this mockup, the monsters are positioned to the left with aggressive looks. In the middle ready to go is the wizard, standing between the monsters and the beach. And to the right, a bit afraid, stands the people.
The placement of the characters are important because when we get into the main game mode the people won’t be on the screen. But since we’ve established that the wizard stands between the monsters and the people, between the sea and the beach, we help the players imagine the people being off screen.
Sound
The wizard and the monsters have sounds. It’s a pretty standard thing to have on your enemies and player. But what more can we do with sound as design space?
We can also establish the people by having them make noise. But where is the best place to make some noise? Since we’re trying to save the people, it makes sense that they would shout if we failed to save them. So when a monsters pass through and the player loses a life, the screams of the people will be heard. This is good since it doubles as feedback for the player losing a life and make logical sense. Since this worked well, can we take it further? What if we can use the sound of the people to double on something else? But what could the people’s voices double on? What if the people cheered when the player hits a monster? That does make sense, since the people are happy that the wizard is succeeding. But that would get annoying fast, and it would get dull hearing it too much. But what if they only cheered at critical attacks? Now we’re getting somewhere! If you’ve played Hearthstone, then you might know of how this works. When you attack with a minion in Hearthstone, you get a crowd cheer based on how much attack that minion have. This creates the feeling of people standing around the board of the game and being invested in the game through cheering. THIS is what we want to recreate. A crowd cheering also doubles as feedback for critical hits in magic writer, making this design double effective. Summary The design: Our main menu shows an image of the story and setting with an importance of left = monsters, middle= wizard, right = people. When we later turn the world 90*, this relationship is kept with the monsters on top, the wizard in the middle and people below the screen. Through sound we will keep the illusion of trying to save people from monsters. This is done through screams when the player loses a life (a monsters passes onto the beach) and cheering when the player gets a critical hit. I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.  |