Aqua's Crusade

2024 Pixel Game Jam:

In May 2024, I participated in my very first game jam. I joined the 2024 Pixel Game Jam hosted by SanForge Studio with two teammates. We had 10 days to make a pixel game following this year's theme: aqua.

Prior to beginning the jam, my team met to get acquainted with each other and understand each other’s interests. We learned that we all like fantasy games and slice of life anime about adventure and friendship. Along with this year’s theme, that led us to Aqua’s Crusade: an underwater adventure where a mermaid named Aqua fights trash in the ocean to gain friends who will help fight the source of the trash. Find the game on itch.io here

Generative Research

Questionnaire

Due to our ten day time limit, I limited the player research to less than a day with a small set of questions in hopes of receiving more responses. Only my friends and family were available on such short notice. I asked the following questions:

Have you played any water/ocean themed games?
1. If yes, what did you like about it?
2. What did you dislike?
3. What was memorable?
Would an aquatic themed game ever appeal to you again?
1. Why or why not?

I received 5 responses linked here. There is some bias because:

All of my responders identify as women
All used to play games as children, none regularly play video games as adults

Common keywords:

Cute
Pretty
Cute animals
Realistic underwater sounds
Realistic movement from water resistance
Barbie
Princess
Mario
No time (can’t play continuously over the course of several days)
maze
Puzzles
Different world

Proto-Persona

From the responses I received, I created a proto-persona of a cozy gamer. Our player enjoys games but never has time for them. They may start and stop playing sporadically. They play games to relieve the stresses of the day. They most enjoy games with simple mechanics, intuitive puzzles, and a relaxing atmosphere.

Context

plays these games on the weekends on their days off, they prefer to settle in so they can have a few hours to themselves

Motivations for playing

immerse themselves in a new world
detress
play simple games like in their childhood

They also play...

Barbie mermaid princess
super mario
animal crossing

Opportunities

simple game mechanics that are easy to remember
adding challenges that don’t require a new set of controls

Reasons for abandoning games

games get too intense and stressful
they get too busy to play a long game consistently especially if it requires remembering multiple mechanics

Find them online at...

discord
instagram
TikTok

Brainstorming

User Flow

Using our proto-persona and a list of possible game screens, we whittled down our wireframes to as few frames as possible. We were always conscious of the burden we would be putting on our developer as he was the only teammate who was comfortable working in Unity

Wireframes

After we agreed on what the minimum viable product should look like, I and one other teammate sketched some wireframes in figma for the developer of our team to implement while we fine-tuned the details of the visual design and created assets

UI style guide

While the developer was implementing these basic screens, I and the other designer searched for aquatic and pixel art references to decide on a color palette and font. We needed to agree on a color palette before we could design any assets. We brainstormed and took inspiration from various aquatic themed games and pixel games in order to settle on the style guide below which we made sure to do accessibility checks on before proceeding

Design

Asset Creation

My teammate took on character design while I designed the environment. This was my first time creating pixel art as well as my first time using Aseprite.

These are the sprites my teammate created:

Main Character

Enemies

These were the first environment tiles I created:

At first, I wasn't able to communicate my vision that I was aiming for a certain order of tiles to achieve a gradient or that the mono-colored flora on the right were meant to be layered as background elements. I also didn't know what was possible in Unity. After some trial and error testing out different designs in Unity, we landed on the environment assets below

Background Tiles

Background Objects

Trash Obstacles

Storyboarding

We then used those assets to create a storyboard and high fidelity mockups. It was here that I learned how important it was to communicate your vision visually instead of just verbally.

Usability Testing

We were beginning to wrap up our project by the end of day 8 and were able to produce a demo by the beginning of day 9. I created another questionnaire and received 3 responses (linked here). I highlighted the responses that came up the most.

Although we did not have time to implement the players’ feedback before submitting, if we had the opportunity to make another iteration we would:

Make a tutorial on how to heal
Have the plastic enemies increase speed with each level so that players can feel there is a challenge
Fix the lag in timing when the main character attacks

The Final Submission

Conclusion

Participating in this game jam taught me how to balance creativity and perfectionism with time efficiency. I learned to overcome imposter syndrome and focus on getting the work done, knowing my teammates were counting on me. It also improved my communication skills with the team, who I am now proud to call my friends. My UX bootcamp taught me that wireframes and prototypes were necessary but this experience drove home why they're so important in being able to communicate my vision. I also realized how useful it was to understand the tools and tasks of the rest of my team even if I'm not directly involved. If I understood Unity better, I would have understood what we were capable of producing and what I could ask of our developer. I greatly enjoyed my first game jam and am already looking forward to the next one!