Goremet Cuisisnes
UI/UX Designer
A competitive cooking card game
What is Goremet Cuisine?
Welcome to the world of Goremet: a post-apocalyptic realm where hungry monsters reside, and the only people that can feed them are the unlucky chefs who find themselves in these lands. Our team of designers were given the opportunity to work with a team of full-stack developers to create a game. Therefore, we decided to bring to life a competitive cooking card game, allowing two to six players to compete by fulfilling a customer’s orders using ingredient cards to enhance their recipes.
My Role in Brainwaves
As the UI/UX Designer, I was involved in the entire design process, and was in charge of optimising Goremet’s interface design and creating a user friendly and fun experience for our players. Through extensive user research and usability testing, our design team ran the extra mile to ensure a smooth user experience whilst creating a fun game with a memorable visual style.
The Goal
Our goal was to design a game that can be played in an optimized state on the browser. The game must have multiplayer capabilities and gameplay. The game must also be easy to learn and have an accessible interface whilst having an appealing visual style with a fun and engaging gameplay.
Deliverables
- Game and studio branding
- A comprehensive game design document
- User research and testing documentations
- Game GUI and asset specifications
- Low-fidelity and high fidelity prototypes
The Design Process
Goremet’s designs adopt a cute monstrous style with paper-cut illustrations, and the game’s narrative will garner dark but humorous gameplay.
Our Vision and Initial Ideation
When presented with this project, our team had to come up with a game that can be designed in two months and developed in one month. This short timeline limited our options in terms of which genres of video games we could explore. Throughout brainstorming, we quickly came to consensus that we wanted to design a cooking card game, since it seemed like a unique and unexplored area of video games.
We wanted this game to have a cute and light-hearted visual style, but include monstrous characters and setting, where the player cooks disgusting appearing food. We also wanted the game to include light-hearted dark humour as well, and the dichotomy between the cute design and the dark themes in the cooking card game garnered the name Goremet Cuisines.
Furthermore, our main concern was how we would design this game with multiplayer capabilities. Our solution was to design a gameplay loop where players are put against each other and create recipes to satisfy customer (Who are NPCs) orders.
Research
In order to determine the viability and authenticity of our ideas for Goremet, initial user research and competitive analysis was necessary. Conducting competitive analysis gave an opportunity for an evaluation of Goremet’s validity in today’s video game landscape. Furthermore, conducting user research through a questionnaire allowed us to identify our target demographic of players and get a framework of who we would be designing Goremet for.
Through the use of Google Forms, our team crafted a questionnaire and we sent it to the public to be filled out, and it inquired the following information about our users:
- Their demographic information (Age, gender, etc.)
- Their gaming experience
- Their digital card game experience
- Their interests in Goremet’s idea
Competitive analysis was done with other digital card games in today’s market, and the data gathered from the questionnaire were visualized and the collected data allowed us to establish a vision and direction for Goremet.
User Persona
The data collected from the questionnaire and competitive analysis gave us insight about who our target demographic would be, and a user persona allowed us to enrich our understanding of this demographic and helped us envision the type of player we would design Goremet for and can be used as a reference during our design process.
Since we wanted Goremet to have a cute and light-hearted design, we expected the game to attract casual players. Therefore, using the collected data from our survey as a reference, I created a primary persona of a casual player who loves to play video games with his friends. We recognized that the gameplay loop of Goremet would attract casual players that would play against their friends. Therefore, we decided to use this persona as our main reference in our design process.
Goremet's Story
When designing Goremet, we wanted to come up with a narrative for the game in order to give the gameplay and visual design more context. We recognized that a story would also give the gameplay a purpose and serve as engagement for the player, and the story is as follows:
The players are chefs who find themselves placed in an isolated post-apocalyptic city after applying for a job posting online. The food truck chefs soon then realise that they are surrounded by starving monsters and have to learn the types of twisted cuisines these monsters like to eat, and if the food they make is not up to the monsters’ standards, the chefs are on the menu.
Goremet's Artstyle
Due to the fact that Goremet would be played as a browser game, our team recognized that in order to deliver an optimizied experience, the game would perform at its best in 2D. We decided to deliver this game in a 2D tabletop format and adopt the artstyle of a paper cut aesthetic similar to games such as Paper Mario. We wanted the design to be colourful and vibrant with an Ironic approach. Therefore, we decided to go for cute designs for monsters, and the food that the player would serve in the game will be grotesque and gross in reality, but would have cute designs in the game.
GUI Design
Goremet garners a light hearted and cute design, and we needed the game user interface to reflect that design. Therefore, we’ve decided to use vibrant tones of purple with the use of almond for contrast. Furthermore, we chose Mali as our type since it is quite legible and reflects the light hearted and cute style we envisioned for the game.
Asset Specification
In addition to Goremet’s GUI style guide, I also crafted an asset specification sheet that lists each asset used in the game and provides the dimensions, colours, font type, and any other necessary information needed about the assets for our developers to use as reference and allow for a smooth development process for Goremet.
Prototyping
Goremet’s prototyping process extended throughout the entire game design process. Initial prototyping was done through paper prototyping and initial usability testing was done using paper cut-outs as the game’s GUI elements.
After establishing Goremet’s GUI style guide and asset specification, we decided to create a comprehensive prototype of the gameplay loop and the game’s GUI on Figma. However, creating a dynamic digital prototype of the game within our time frame was extremely time consuming. Therefore, we decided to conduct our game testing by delivering Goremet as a board game to our testers. The game board, characters, cards, and other GUI components were all printed and play tested as a board game in order to bring our testers a more dynamic experience. However, the digital prototype made on figma was still necessary since it is a useful asset for our developers to use as reference during the development process.
Developer Handoff
Through constant testing and frequent communication with our development team, I inquired about their scope of what aspects of our proposed gameplay ideas were able to be developed. In order to make their development process a smooth experience, I made sure the assets and specification sheet was fully taken care of. After the completion of Goremet’s assets, they were organized in a file system and were pushed onto the dev team’s github. Furthermore, a copy of the Figma prototypes were also sent to the dev team to use as reference alongside a game design document, specifying Goremet’s rules and game logic.
Goremet's Marketing
Once Goremet’s development started, our design team began to focus on marketing the game. Our main method of marketing our game was a promotional video to cover the bases of Goremet and its gameplay, and a promotional website to introduce new users to the game.
Challenges and Key Takeaways
This project was my first attempt in the game design process, and prototyping a game on Figma posed a great challenge since Goremet’s gameplay was very complex. Prototyping a dynamic game on figma was very time consuming. An aspect that I would have done differently would have been to prototype Goremet by using a game engine such as Godot instead of Figma
Conclusion
I designed a competitive cooking card where players go against each other and create recipes using ingredient cards to satisfy the hunger of the monstrous customers. I was fully involved in every aspect of the design process. I conducted user research and competitive analysis to assess the validity and authenticity of Goremet. I designed the game's GUI elements and produced a multitude of game assets and produced a comprehensive GUI specification sheet to be used as a reference for our developers. I also produced prototypes of Goremet and conducted various usability testing sessions to bring the game’s design and gameplay aspects to its full potential. This project gave me the opportunity to expand upon my user experience and user interface design skill. I was also able to further develop my asset creation and prototyping skills with the use of Figma and Adobe Illustrator.. Designing Goremet allowed me to get a chance to immerse myself in the world of UI/UX design.
Navid Memari
work.nmemari@gmail.com
