To support the “Always Different, Always Refreshing” campaign I planned and designed a classic photo hunt game for the Retina display iPad.
Agency: Grey NY \ ECD: Eric Segal
Age-gate welcome screen, gently encouraging you to connect the game to your Facebook account.
Home base. From here you can start a new game, find a refreshing beverage, compare scores, and try not to push the red button.
How the game is played. Also shown: texture and depth effects that take advantage of the extra-dense pixel display.
One idea was to incorporate in-game audio commentary which could be adjusted from an encouraging, grandmotherly setting to a mean, heckler setting. This was outside the budget.
A carousel of refreshing beverages.
Gameplay screen. An incorrect tap earns you a time deduction, a big red "x" and a buzzer.
Gameplay screen. Correct taps earn you points and time. Each location is marked and numbered to help track your progress.
Pause screen. No cheating.
Game complete. Ridiculously high score totals is something I borrowed from stand-up pinball games. Social sharing counts as a "brag" — once enough bragging happens the app is updated with a new set of photos to hunt.
What it feels like to win the game, win a round, and to not win at all.
Process
To get started, I did a quick survey of existing photo hunt games and noted the basic mechanics of the genre as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the individual apps. Afterwards I sketched out a user flow and a set of tertiary game features cribbed from some of the more successful touch screen games of the time. Mainly Angry Birds.
UX/UI chicken scratch.
