About the Game
Spin Cycle is an iPhone game with a simple one-touch control mechanism.
The game play is about tapping the machine to change the water's direction and keep your pets alive for as long as you can!
Elevator to the specific section
My Role
UI Assets
Flow Chart
Wireframing
Motion Design
Tutorial Design
Concept Art
Character Design
Environment Design
Animation
Logo/Icon Design
Game Design
Prototyping
Difficulty Tuning
Game Trailer
Concept
The game concept is from yin and yang - the two opposing principles in nature. Then I came up with the idea of cat and fish, water and air. The original game prototype is on PC, using the space bar and array keys to control the water level. Since we think the game play and game theme are very fit for it to be a mobile game, our team did a lot of testing on the control methods on the touch screen.
Original Game Prototype
One touch control on touch screen
Keyboard control on PC
Game Art
Character Design
Environment Design
UI/UX Design
The first version of the game tutorial
Players get information from a static picture before they start the game.
The final version of the game tutorial
Players receive instructions while they play the game. The game gives players instant feedback for their input.
Game UI is in the game environment
The game UI and UI motion design are centered around the laundry machine. To make good use of screen real estate, the health/score bar and pause button are placed in a familiar area for players, on the laundry machine control panel.
Making good use of the character
Spin Cycle is a fast speed casual game, the average play time length per time is just a few minutes. In order to let players remember this game and come back to play again, emphasize the character of the cute cat and silly fish while players are playing the game is the key. Design the game characters into the interface makes the interface looks more interesting and helps the players to remember the game.
Icon Design
As the designer, artist and UI/UX designer in our two person's team, the whole process of from come up with a prototype idea to put it on App store is a valuable experience for me.
As a freemium game, a suitable gameplay is definitely needed, and which SpinCycle has (simple one-touch control mechanism/quick round/funny story), but besides that, there still needs a lot of economics system design to help the game to be success, so we added advertisement video after players played a few rounds and we are planning to add more characters which allow players to unlock them when players get enough scores. And we found people like challenging with each other; they like biting high scores when we were playtesting/exhibiting the game in few events. So we added high score board and social media share system to meet the needs.
Overall, the whole process of development this game is not only about design a good gameplay or character, but also about all the stuff besides that, like how to engage/maximum players experience, add commercial value into a game and how to manage App store materials and doing social media to get people's attention.
Thoughts
Developing with Eric Teo
Developing Tool: Unity, Illustrator