With two group mates, I ideated, designed, and prototyped a 1-player game that seeks to generate community competition amongst students in a low-use study space at Yale. 

Leveraging HTML, JavaScript, and Phaser, I developed the starting screen and instruction page, created the random circle generation logic, and connected scenes across the game. I also acted as project manager, ensuring that group and individual tasks were being completed throughout the implementation of the project.

Final project for CPSC 484 at Yale, Human Computer Interaction

Our 1-player game is played on a large screen TV connected to a Kinect Azure sensor. The goal of our game is for a user to hit circles that randomly emerge around our screen and accumulate a score. After the game runs for 30 seconds, this score will contribute to the score of a Residential College of your choosing.

GAME DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

We began with problem ideation to identify pain points in our target population. We then performed design research and initial ideation with sticky notes, pen and paper. On Figma, we iterated on a low-fi prototype to develop a hi-fi prototype with animations. With our problem space, design solutions, and Figma prototype, we developed a prototype system and performed user testing.

The problem space we identified at Yale is that undergraduate students feel too busyand have a difficult time participating in community building activities, like extracurricular events and intramural sports. We identified 17 Hillhouse, an engineering building with a low-traffic study and sitting space where many students rest or work in between classes. By making a quick, eye-catching game that can be utilized in short periods of time (before class, after class, waiting for someone, taking a break from work), we can not only leverage the friendly competition that exists from the university’s Residential College system, but also engage with students who use the space throughout the day.


This game addresses two tasks.

First, we aim to create an application that is conscious of the user's potential time limitation while being in 17 Hillhouse. We indicate the time it takes to play our game upfront, implement a running timer during the game, provide an opportunity for users to exit the game at any given time during the experience. If a user leaves the screen, or the kinect does not sense a user, the game will reset.

Second, we aim to create an application that allows user to feel a sense of competition in a non-communal space like 17 Hillhouse and contribute to the Residential College community on Yale's campus. Because students feel an existing sense of pride to their Residential College, we aim to use that as incentive to play our game, contribute to their College, and meet other people who play for their own Residential College.

DESIGN GOALS

After observing students in this study space, talking to students who attend classes in 17 Hillhouse, and working in the space ourselves, we learned that the main reason why students stay in the space is ton not “lose” time in their day. Rather than moving to another space on campus to sit or study, students decide to sit in this space to reduce travel time in the day. When students are asked to participate in studies or activities, we tracked a higher participancy rate if students were aware of the duration of the activity before participating. Lastly, we learned that students are more willing to participate in optional activities if it were related to Residential College pride and competition. We ensured that our project was mindful of these user preferences, integrating our observations and studies into the design and implementation of our game.

Demo of student playing our prototype in 17 Hillhouse

WHAT WE DID WELL

During the design research process, we gained a lot of value from talking to people who study and take courses in 17 Hillhouse. We were able to ideate lots of potential projects and honed down our game to a design that worked with our solution space and design goals.

During our prototype implementation, we relied on Nielson’s 10 Heuristics to improve our prototype. We believe that we were successful in keeping style consistent across the game experience, using a simple but appealing design, establishing confirmation pages between phases in our game, and offering multiple ways for users to pause/quit the game.

WHAT WE COULD IMPROVE ON

During our research process, we wish we performed for research on games that use similar technologies to the ones we leveraged (i.e. Kinect Azure sensor and phasor). When testing our prototype on the TV screen, we noticed that we should account for people of different heights, as some people struggled to reach their limbs to hover on elements placed at the top and corners of the screen. We also noticed that players struggled to read the amount of text we placed in our instruction screen, suggesting that we may consider writing more explicit and brief instructions to reduce the burden of the user to figure out the game through their first playing experience.