2019
During my second semester of the master’s programme “Interactive Technologies” I designed the User Interface for a project from the Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies at the UAS St. Pölten.
Together with the Institute For Addiction Prevention Vienna we created a mobile game for adolescents to raise awareness of risky situations at parties.
In the game “All Tomorrow’s Parties” you are responsible for your group of friends during a party night. The player’s task is to make sure everyone has a good time and comes home safely. It is also about growing your in-game clique and learning how to maintain their friendship by taking actions that correspond to your friends’ personality. If they don’t feel comfortable around you or with your actions, they will leave your clique.
Games, videos or apps that intend to influence peoples’ view on topics such as drugs and alcohol always tend to be too obviously patronising. As soon as the users notice that, they lose interest in the game. This game aims to not be patronising but to simply show the consequences of your actions without judgement.
One of the biggest challenges was to convey the status of the friends who are partying with the player. Every friend has a confined comfort zone where he/she feels comfortable. If they leave their comfort zone, they stop going to parties with you or even end up having an accident. The confined space that is available on a mobile device was also a challenge. We wanted to give the player a good overview about how the party is going but also detailed information about every single person and their current status in their comfort zone.
After we defined the gameplay, we drew Mockups to visualise which information we need to present the player at which state of the game. Underneath you can see and click through the actual click-dummy that I created with Adobe Experience Designer based upon our Mockups. With the help of this prototype, we were able to see how our assumptions and ideas come together. The prototype also enabled us to test the game’s flow with various people. The characters were done by Stefanie Größbacher. As they were already available, I started using them early in the project to get a better feeling of where we were going.
More information on this project is available on the official website of the Creative\Media/Technologies Institute of UAS St. Pölten https://research.fhstp.ac.at/en/projects/isp-empowerment-game
Team:
Peter Judmaier, Lucas Schöffer and Stefanie Größbacher