NMC Portfolio - Hue & Co.

Description of Project

Hue & Co. is the result of the first client-based assignment for first year Game Design students at HKU. For our team, the client was the director of the Games department. The task was to design and develop an interactive experience to show at the HKU Open Day, which is an event where interested parents and potential students visit the school to learn about it. We decided to make a multiplayer minigame-oriented puzzle game that emphasized what we valued about our school experience, which was making friends. We had multiple limitations for this assigment: it needed to support at least two players, be digital in some way, and take around 3-10 minutes to properly experience. It also had to 'spark joy', which is another reason we aimed to create something that could engage visitors and leave them with a good first impression of the university.

My role was to design the gameplay and minigames. My primaryfocus was defining the rules and mechanics as well as using playtests during the Open Day to iterate and improve on the concept.

Game Concept

Our goal was to create a co-op game that would test and encourage players that did not know each other to communicate. Because of the unknown variety of potential visitors, we also needed to make the game easily accessible, so that even people with little gaming experience could still participate with their children. In a way, the game was designed as an elaborate ice-breaker.

The final experiece became a three part team-based quiz game show where players competed to earn points for their assigned color (red, yellow, blue). The quiz consisted of three alternating mini-games: a trivia section where people were on a short timer, a multiplayer coloring and memory game in which every player was assigned one unique color, and a maze puzzle where one player who could see the whole maze guided the other two players who had limited vision. Each activity required teamwork, memory and communication, with points being rewarded for performance. The amount of points earned was directly influenced by how well they worked together. The players wore wristbands in their color throughout the Open Day and served as a way of starting conversations.

Major Learnings

The biggest takeaways from this project came from it being the first large scale experience I worked on. It was our first group collaboration and the first game specifically designed for a public showcase. A key part of the process for me was learning to collaborate with artists and adapt the design of the mini-games to match their preferred aesthetics and mediums. For instance, after hearing some of my early ideas, the artists proposed a 1970s game show theme, which later inspired the trivia style sections of the game.

This project also gave me the opportunity to explore social and communication-driven game design for the first time.