Visual Design Group 1 - Matt, Karyim & Cicek

Monster Catalog – Matt, Karyim and Cicek

The Style and Precedents:
As a visual design group, we mostly focused on the interface of creating the monsters. The reason behind this is very simple: personalization. The age group that we are dealing with is very "protective" of their creations. Letting them create a masterpiece will tie their attention to the game a lot faster. Creating an identity for themselves and giving the chance to dominate over certain decision will give them a nice feeling a power, therefore satisfaction.

The X + Y + Z precedents of the style of the game is : Jimmy Neutron meets Dexter Labs with a hint of Sponge Bob Squarepants (visual support and some background information). The reason behind this is the same reason behind the editorial voice: we wanted to keep things simple and bring a goofier, funnier and cartoony tone rather than a serious scary feeling of the monsters.
Jimmy Neutron:
Is about a very smart kid who has an IQ of 210 and huge head to fit it in. With this enormous brain he invents project that can do impossible things. the editorial voice of this animation series is goofy, just the was we like it. Design-wise we chose this as a precedent because of the playfulness of the color palette.




Dexter's Lab:
The general plot is almost the same: A smart kid inventing stuff. But this time the lab is hidden behind his bookshelf which is relating to our idea of how the player enters the game. The user's room looks nice and usual. The costumes are hung up on the the closet, looking like nothing is unusual, but when the user wears it and looks into the mirrors, they will see their monster side!
We got inspired of the style as well: 2-D and funny.



The interface:

The monster catalog is an ancient book found by the user. When the catalog is opened up, the user can choose a certain monster and change some attributes of it. We envision the Monster Catalog as an ancient book that has been around for generations. By creating an interesting story around the history and workings of this fantastical book, we hope to provide the air of mystery and wonder that we believe will hold the attention and imagination of our audience.
The monsters:
The monsters represent the basic choice of style.

The reason behind this is simple: if we let the users to create monster from scratch, the variations among them will be too much. If we keep some certain features common, there is a great chance for the users to interact with the others who look like themselves.

--More images coming soon--

Course Summary - Phase 1

It's been a long time in coming, but here is the first real blog post for the Scholastic Collab Studio Fall 07 Course Blog. The subject of this post will be a short summary of the first phase of the course.

The first four weeks of the course were devoted to Phase 1 design work. The main goals of this phase were to identify a basic design objective and then allow groups of students to make proposals for how to achieve that objective. The design objective for this phase was to conceive of a casual immersive world for 8-12 year olds that was themed around monsters and focused at least in part on supporting sophisticated user-generated content (as distinct from simple personalization). The code name for the project was Monster Quest.

In order to achieve this goal, we began by looking at the competition in casual immersive worlds and kids user generated content. This content was introduced in lecture and then explored in more depth in Assignment 1, which focused on market research.

Once we has established the basic state of the market and design space in which we were working, we began focusing on refining our vision for the game. In order to do so, we divided the class into four groups for Assignment 2. Each group spent a week focused on a core aspect of the site -- economy, player role, quests (i.e. game experiences) and monsters (i.e. game characters).
The results of Assignment 2 were reported back to the class the following week. After listening to each report, we then divided into four new groups for Assignment 3. In this assignment, each group received the same task - use the work of the four groups and your own ideas to come up with a creative brief for Monster Quest. The creative brief was intended to present a full vision for the game, from editorial tone to game mechanics to look and feel.

After an intense week of work, each group presented their Assignment 3 efforts to the class. Once the presentations were finished, David and Isaac (the course instructors) took each of the briefs and condensed them over the course of a week into a single creative vision to be used in Phase 2 conceptual prototype work.