Game Design
Uprooted
Uprooted is a digital board game created for my Game Design 2 class at UW Madison. You play as a plant and try to outcompete your opponent for root space underground before the storm arrives.
Class: Curriculum 477 Game Design 2 at UW Madison
Role: Game and UX Designer
Teammates: Kevin Joseph, Ruby Lampert, Catherine Carey
Tools Used: Unity, Figma
Timeline: February - May 2023
Game Design Process
Iterative playtesting guided a lot of the decisions made in designing the game.
Initially, the game was slower paced. This meant that:
Players would collect water which they could then spend on power cards.
Cards were harder to play.
Many turns where you wouldn't do anything other than place a root, a pattern that players did not like on the game's first play test.
To fix this, we made it so that players would gain water every turn, so that players could play cards more often and have the ability to cycle through their deck and explore their options.
Here we see one card that changed over the course of the game's development. One of the initial ideas was for the game to draw both root cards and power cards. The first version of War Of The Roses made use of this.
However, a few factors made us decide to make roots an action that would occur every turn. One of them was the fact that this was how roots were implemented in our first build of the game. The other is that it seemed overly complex to have two types of cards, both rule wise and UI wise.
Following this change, I had war of the roses synergize with the thorn card, that was already implemented, as an expensive but big payoff. Further evolutions of the card were made to make the card text more concise and clear.
You can view the game's development blog here: https://github.com/kjoseph8/Uprooted/wiki
UI/UX Process
As UI/UX designer I was in charge of designing our game's UI as well as coming up with quality of life improvements to enhance player experience. Not everything in my prototype made it into the final game due to time constraints, but it served as a good baseline for how our game would look.
Below are examples of the prototype (left) versus the final game (right).
Game Screen
Character Select
One of the changes I advocated for the implementation of tool tips in our game (pictured below). Essentially, when a player hovers over certain cards that require clarification, a small pop up will appear explaining that clarification.
One of the main cards this was used on was the Forest Fire card which sets an opposing root on fire. However, this fire can spread to your own roots. The card text itself was already lengthy, so there was no room to explain this on the card without making the font extremely small.
Alex beckerman
Objectives
Overview
Design game mechanics
Design game user interface
Conduct user testing
Refine designs based on user and developer feedback
Design a 2D kid friendly game
Work collaboratively with a developer, artist, and producer to create a game
What I did
