game design document

Before showing the designs and completed version of my interface for this game. I will first take you through an explanation of the controls. This will help you to understand what it is my interface will be doing and how it will work.

‘animal crossing: city folk’ is on the wii and only for the wii. Which even though it would be nicer if it was on different gaming platforms, it wouldn’t be possible to make this happen, because it would affect the controls and the overall gaming experience that you receive.

The controls are fairly simple but many of them are motion based. Most of the motion based controls can be substituted with a button control for instance fishing can be activated by swinging your remote like a fishing rod. Or it could be activated by pressing the ‘A’ button.  Moving this game onto a different platform will take away this ability. Even though the ‘X-box connect’ has recently emerged. The experience still won’t be quite the same since with the wii you have a physical object that will act as a rod

Motion also has an effect on whether you can see the inventory options or not. When the pointer is not on the screen everything on your screen will be gone.  Though once on the screen the inventory tab will become available. When your character is not walking or moving the clock will then come up. The idea was to make as much screen see able as possible. Without cluttering it up with icons and such.

The controls were made to be quite easily understandable as the game was aimed to make it playable for children of the age of 3+, which was achieved since the controls are simple and easily memorable.      

Despite the young age rating, the most common people to play these games are either, older teens that aren’t massive or hard core gamers and would prefer a more relaxing and easy going game, or young children.

Having the age rating as it is, strikes me as an extremely good idea as it vaguely teaches the ‘grown up’ life style to children in a fun way, since this game is a ‘slice of life’ style game in which you are made to earn money, make friends with neighbours and pay a mortgage. Unfortunately for the more thrill seeking gamers, this game is not what they would look for.        

http://www.gameslave.co.uk/imageviewer.cfm?img=30349&title=Animal-Crossing-City-Folk
http://kupika.com/XxMISSMEWMEWxX/Animal-Crossing
http://www.smh.com.au/news/games/animal-crossing-wild-world/2006/01/11/1136956230447.html

There aren’t many games in this franchise, with there only being 3. The first, on the Nintendo game cube, the second, on the Nintendo DS, and the third, on the Nintendo wii.

Each of these games all have the same basic controls, goals, and graphics. They don’t differ much aside from the designs of the interfaces and the quality of the graphics since each game has had big time differences.

Every one of the game interface designs have all been rounded and soft which I liked very much and wanted to keep in my design. The colours are also quite bright but not to ‘in your face’ I liked this and wanted to keep it.

Whilst designing my interface for ‘animal crossing: city folk’ I kept in mind the parts that I liked the most from the original game.  In one of the 3 games there was use of rounded squares instead of just circles.so I decided to bring that trait back and based most of my interface around rounded square shapes.

The aim of my interface was to take up as less space as possible of the screen but too keep at least something on there to indicate that there is in fact a menu.

Overall I am happy with the way that my final outcome has ended up and I think that it is smart and simple. Sticking to the original themes but also being something new.