OUGD505 - Product, Range, Distribution - Key Game Stages

I identified Angry Birds, Rhino Raid and Temple Run as the most important games to take some sort of inspiration as they're massively successful and well-known games whose concepts remains the same throughout slightly different levels.

From these games it became clear that the key stages a game needed were:

• Title Screen
• Pre-Title Credit Screens
• Menu
• Loading Screen variations
• Level Select
• Gameplay Screen (3 different ones for the different play modes)
• Pause Menu
• Find Out More
• Donation Page/Shop

I started storyboarding how the app could function and look in terms of it's layout.

During this process I made a few decisions about the functionality of the app:

Variations of Loading Screens

Rhino Raids loading screens were titled "Fail!" and "Rhino Fact!"dependent on how they were accessed. Despite this the information on them wasn't exclusive to that particular title. The differentiation between the styles was noticeable enough to the point where I wanted to read them to try and differentiate between the two, in doing so I paid more attention to their content. This is somewhat comparable to the Chance and Community Chest cards in Monopoly and is something I want to adopt in my loading screens.

No Pause Function or Pause Menu

The idea is that this game is time-based in order to pressure the user into solving the problems before the pandas die out, so having a pause function seems contradictory to this. As there will no longer be a pause menu, the options that would've been on there need to be on the gameplay screen. Having icons that represent these options allows me to keep there small and out of the way.

Exclusion of "Loan Out Panda" Option
Initially the idea behind this option was that it allowed to player to loan a panda to a zoo for a year in return for extra funds to buy land. After more consideration, this could make the game too easy due to having too much money available, as well as adding an extra mechanic, when my research has shown games should be kept as simple as possible.

Combined Find Out More and Donate Page

Neither of these pages on their own would be particularly interesting to most 8-12 year olds, so by mashing them into one I am reducing the size and loading time of the app. It also means that there are will be two buttons on the menu screen that leads to the donation page, increasing the chances of a donation. The screen size is too small to display large amounts of text, so the 'Find Out More' functionality will only be links to articles that would open up in the phones web browser, meaning the encroachment that the donation screen has on the find out more page isn't too costly in terms of losing space for content.