Client
United Nations
Timeline
01/2022 ~ 05/2022
My Role
Team Lead
UI/UX Design
3D Design
PC Game — Shapetopia
During the second semester of my graduate school, I was in a team named ‘Sustain Dev’ and collaborated with United Nations Sustainability Initiative. The team developed a game named ‘Shapetopia’ that emphasizes the broader conception of sustainability for the university community, especially CMU students.
Client Objectives — Director of Sustainability Initiative
Develop an interactive game so that the university community can both learn about their school’s contributions towards sustainable development and provide additional input, with an emphasis on the broader conception of sustainability defined by the Global Goals.
Little Background of Sustainable Development Goals
The Sustainable Development Goals, also known as the SDGs or Global Goals, are 17 objectives that came together following input from millions of people around the world. They were adopted by all countries at the United Nations in 2015.
Goal for this Project
We aimed to explore a less traditional or didactic way of enlightening the college student on the notion of SDGs and their interconnections. We hope to create a change in their mind about how they contributed and will be contributing to the SDGs that persists after they play the game.
Overview
Video Trailer
It was pretty clear that the game’s target audiences are students based on client objectives. So another ux designer in the team and I started to find some students on campus and interviewed them trying to find out their awareness level of SDGs and their daily interest towards game.
Target Audiences
I conducted 10 user interviews on our target users’ opinions and knowledge about sustainable development and conclude some pain points. I want to further understand students’ awareness and contribution to SDGs.
Problem 1: Students don't want to know about sustainable development because it contains too many goals and covers too much knowledge.
Problem 2: The game should be fun to play, easy to understand, and easy to access.
Problem 3: Students are hard to relate the 17 goals to their daily lives.
After we define the demographic and discussion with our clients, we found that the biggest challenge of this project is
How can we let the players understand what they can do related to real-life to help achieve sustainable development?
Problem Statement
To help identify the pain points from the target users’ perspective
To understand SDG and 17 goals, I led the team to researched and exchanged our knowledge and opinions about how these goals make society more sustainable. We created a research board to store all the information, then categorized goals into some words that are often used to describe the development of cities
Indicators
Those words help players quickly get insight into the connection between SDGs and their lives, so we decided to use some indicators in the gameplay to showcase how the player's decisions affect sustainable development.
We finally decided the four indicators were:
Discuss the Solution
To help the target users to quickly understand how 17goals relate to their daily life
Problem 1: Students don't want to know about sustainable development because it contains too many goals and covers too much knowledge.
Problem 3: Students are hard to relate the 17 goals to their daily lives.
How Do Players Access the Game?
The using scenario for this game is “During recess or when students are tired of doing homework and want take a rest”
The experience should be easy and relaxing for the user. So, we decided to use WebGL to generate a link so that users can open the game with a computer anywhere, anytime.
What Players Can Do
Player’s Role: New mayor of a virtual city
Mission: Lead the city to a sustainable developing path by executing policies.
Mechanisms: Draw cards randomly and then decide which policies to execute.
Challenge: Evaluate the policies and balance the negative aspect of consequences.
Problem 2: Fun to play, easy to understand, and easy to access.
Our initial concept was to develop a Policy Making Card Game that enables players to implement policies aligned with sustainability goals, such as constructing public schools, investing in railways, or introducing equal pay legislation. The game's mechanics involve altering indicators to show the impact of these policies on sustainable development. After creating a paper prototype, we discovered that players desired more visual feedback than just the indicator changes.
We decided to incorporate a virtual city into the game, where the effects of policies are visually represented in the city's appearance and affect its residents, providing the sought-after visual feedback.
Example of the effects that executed policy card to the indicator
Player executes the policy card “ Expanded City’s bike network”, and the related indicator gets affected.
Final Solution
Information Structure
I created this structure to help the team clarify the basic user flow and point out the basic feature of this game.
Wireframe
Based on the game flow, I create a low-fidelity wireframe for UI designers, artist and developers to clearly understand the user experience and the game's essential functions.
Stories Behind the Process
To enhance our team's efficiency in game development and deepen the understanding of gameplay.
After we wrapped up our first version of the game, I conducted user testing with 30 target audiences of different ages and careers. Most of the players are college students based on our target audiences.
Predict the user’s behavior
Before the user testing, another UX designer in our team and I created a user journey map based on three personas. Our goal is to predict the players' feelings and behavior in each game stage.
We wanted to compare the prediction with the result of the observation and efficiently improve the game experience.
User Testing
To find problems to improve the game experience and see if our game achieves the overall project's goal.
From the survey that users filled out, we pay more attention on the impact of SDGS on players during the game experience.
We have 30 users and 21 of them didn’t know about Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) before playing the game
27 of them have a clear understanding after this game experience
“ It expands my knowledge of sustainability. I didn't know equality belongs to it before. I am working in banking, and I feel that we could use these metrics to help with our hiring practices. “
Quantitative Research
Survey
For our observation, I discovered some critical problems. For example,
Interface UI is easily neglected: Budgets, Collection, descriptions with long words, and even the “END” button.
On the other hand, some testers are interested in action on our games, which is not our original design:
Try to interact with every UI on the screen.
Enjoy exploring the city.
Qualitative Research
Observation
Need to integrate the SDGs into the gameplay more completely than before.
Users want to get more feedback after they place any policy cards.
Most of the users are losing focus when there are too many words and information
User Testing Takeaways
Although the final result is that most of the testers are enjoying the game and considered it a fun game, there are some major issues we need to address. Based on the problems and solutions we learned from the user testing, we made changes to the game from UI, sound, and Programming.
The game is mainly composed of four parts: Tutorial, Playing cards, Interview and Summary page.
Final Design
The player starts the game. A letter from the developer team shows up on screen introducing them to the SDGs and thanking them for playing and caring.
Start the game
The tutorial starts with the secretary Blobby Head Jr. introducing you, the mayor, to the game. The player learns the basics of the game.
Tutorial
Players make their own choice of which card they want to execute to make their “city” better.
Visual Feedback
The city and the elements inside it will change their appearance when the indexes increase or decrease, which can give players a sense of what kind of effects their decision brought.
As the Environmental Responsibility and Prosperity for All increases, more buildings will appear, and the fog covering the city will disappear because of the improvement of the environment.
As the Quality of Life and Equal Opportunity increased, the walking status of the citizens around the city changed. There is also a popup that shows the current emotional status of each citizen. The popup will also vary based on the indexes.
Play the card
After spending all the coins, the player ends the round and interviews citizens. Seeing two pieces of interview, one of them is positive and the other is negative, the player gets appreciated for the good deeds and gains a clearer goal for the next round.
Interview
The player gets an overview of their whole game including a summary of the four indexes and which goals they collected during the game as well as the secretary Blobby Head Jr. congrats on them and becoming their successor.
Ending Page
We are lucky to be invited by Michael Henninger to an interview to talk about our game concepts. It was published on the CMU news site for Earth Day. As the process went on, Michael concluded our interview into a news article, which not only advertised our game but also motivated us to work harder for the rest of our project semester.
Link : https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2022/april/global-goals-game.html
Lesson Learned
A better workspace atmosphere leads to better work performance and quality products. Maintaining a happy workplace is very important so members can share their thoughts and feelings freely without any concerns. It can also lead to better teamwork. We are willing to share responsibilities.
Our team has a basic understanding of the video game prototype process through this semester. At first, I had no idea what we would do with a client project. Luckily, with the effort and patience of both clients and the team members, we made a prototype that related to SDGs and was interviewed by the CMU news. I have a better understanding of the game industry; hopefully, this knowledge can apply to my future career.
Impact
NEXT PROJECT
NEXT PROJECT
A comprehensive travel planning platform, where users can chat, schedule, budget, and consider spontaneous additions to any preconceived plans.