Designing for the User

Designing for the User

Brief can be found HERE.

Proposal

The Brief for this asked us to redesign a UI for an existing game or to develop a new UI for a game of our own. We had to pick a game that we felt could be improved or made easier to newcomers or just add things we generally thought was lacking. For this brief i decided to redesign the UI for Final Fantasy XI, this UI has a lot of good features but i personally and a lot of other people find it hard to navigate around finding these featues so i thought i could change it to make it more simple.

I have obviously submitted a large propostal document but it would be a waste of space to upload here due to it being 14mb so any other information regarding my proposal can be found on that.

Research

Research for this was fairly simple Final Fantasy XI is an MMO and ive played a lot of MMO's in the past few years so ive come to learn what does what and what i personally think works best. Regarding research for this, i played FFXI and other MMO's and compared the features taking what i liked from the other games and figuring out how to implement them into FFXI i also had a look around some forums as most mainstream MMO's have a forum about UI discussion or modding so i could read up on what the majority of the playerbase liked regarding different features.

Planning(and putting in to practice.)

Once i had done my research and had a rough idea in my head of things i would like to include into my work, i set about drawing some sketches of the UI and including notes on points of interest giving reasons for why i want to include it. After making a number of these and changing things till i got it right i started doing some mock up screens in Photoshop to get a feel for how much available screen space i would have for the actual UI while still leaving another room to see the actual game, i had to adjust the scaling on various things until i was happy with it.

I had my mock up's complete and had sorted out a good scale and design so the next thing to do was actually get some ingame footage recorded so i could see how the mock up's looked overlayed onto the frapsed material which gave me a chance to change any colours or scaling issues i may not have expected. Once this was completed i set about making the actual graphics for the individual pieces in my UI in Photoshop while starting to import things into flash to get a rough idea for the structure.

As my flash was going to be mostly a movie i had to import serveral minutes of flash and then go through frame by frame adding my created graphics at the correct points and syncing up sound to any button clicks my mouse would do. After spending many hours on this and being somewhat happy with it i made an interactive part of one of the sequences instead of just a mouse tweening around the screen so the user could actually try it for themselves and get a better feeling for how it was suppose to work in my mind

The Work

As the movie is 1024x768 it would mess up my site so it can be viewed

HERE (opens in new window)

Review/Evaluation

Overall i would say im quite pleased with how my work turned out however im fairly sure the brief expected more interactivity then i made but i initially made the movie months ago and after getting it exactly how i liked it i realise i didnt have the flash capabilitys to make the whole thing interactive due to how i had made a lot of my graphics so i carried on making the actual video as best as i could and then adding a small bit of interactivity at the end with what i had to work with.

I had some problems on the way, i initially made my video 800x600 resolution but after making quite a lot of progress i realised this was just too small, besides anything else i would think 99% of people playing games dont play in 800x600 anyway so it wasnt a good represenation, with the graphics at a large enough size to be readable i found the UI was taking up majority of the screen so i deleted all this and started it again in 1024x768. This set me back a couple of weeks but i know it was the right thing to do as at least 1024x768 is still a used resolution in quite a few places.

Another issue i had was that when i frapsed footage i couldnt get any sound as i think fraps doesnt work well with certain onboard sound chips so i basically had to make the whole demonstration silent and then get the official ingame music and then sync it as best i could to the video.

Ignoring these issues as i mentioned im still fairly happy with the outcome, if i was to do it again i would make it a lot smaller and do things interactive instead of a 5-6 minute video as trying to sync sounds and tweens over 9000-10000 frames in flash takes a lot longer than i expected and due to its size trying to preview the file would result in 6-10fps even tho i have a good pc.

NAvigation

Year Three

Semester One/Two