LEEK WEEK COLLECTION
ROLE
UI Designer & Mechanics Programmer
DESCRIPTION
Leek Week Collection is an experimental farming game that tampers with player interaction and game purpose. Players will expect a farming simulator but will instead get a project that tests their sense of play and enjoyment. In a group of 3, our core goal in this project was to subvert the expectations of a typical game. After long discussions in our free time, we came up with the idea that a game can be any concept interacted with as long as the player believes that they are playing a game. We created this project to This project took three weeks to complete.
DEVELOPMENT
May-June 2024
GENRE
Farming Simulator/Experimental
Platform
Itch.io
CONTRIBUTION
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Problem/Idea: Given our idea that any interaction could be a game as long as the player believes so, we set up this project to test the player to see at what point they stop believing that they are playing a game. I helped propose a farming-simulation game as the genre and designed the subsequent levels ("labeled as different games to trick the player") to strip down the game to the core concept of a farming simulator - the passage of time.
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Expectation Design: Each "game" (level) subverts the UX of the previous game. To establish consistent a workflow, I created a user journey map to identify the expectations of the players during each level and ideated on how to subvert the UX design. My thought flow went something like: "The last game had the player buying and selling crops to achieve victory in buying the big white house, now for the next game we should try and make the buying and selling arbitrary by imposing random values". From there, I contributed to the idea of removing player agency until they were just met with a clock, the final stage.
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Time-Based Systems and Feedback: Our core concept was the passage of time, so I made sure to keep this throughout the development by implementing time-based events in Unity to simulate the stages of crop growth from planting to wilting, the player speed, and helping with the day/night cycle.
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Core Mechanics, User Interface, and Balancing: Core systems I developed for the project were the crop-buying and seed-selling shops, the money calculators, and the randomness of input to interfere with the player. I learned the importance of visual theming in UI and how to a streamlined UI for purchasing products.
