Archive for the ‘Professional Video Games’ Category

The Game’s main interfaces

Level selection stage and the actual game in progress

Genre: Time-management.
Worked with: Game design and balancing, design and art of the interfaces, co-created the story and wrote the dialogues.
Released in: TBA 2010.

My Own Beauty Center is a DS title aimed for little girls and pre-teens where you play as Cindy, a girl who wants to work at a beauty parlor. However, she’s so clumsy she’s always destroying something. She has a hobby of collecting old furniture and items from secondhand shops, and one day she buys herself a piggybank. It turns out that this piggybank is in fact a wizard, who grants her a wish – to have her own beauty center!

The game’s proposition was to include several minigames from our previous DS titles into a new one, in a lower budget project. Therefore, we decided to focus our efforts on the game’s art, story, music and personal style, trying to create a more unique experience from these standard girly casual titles.

I was very happy with my work in My Own Beauty Center. I didn’t get to work on the game design as much as I wanted (it was mostly done, since we were using the other minigames for creating this one), but I loved the UI Art and the game’s script!

Click below if you want to see more pictures and read about these other aspects of the game:

Avalon's First Stage - Earth

Avalon Potion Making Minigame

Genre: Casual RTS (persistent world)
Worked with: UI Design and some of its art, tutorial system, game design of the minigames, the game’s script and quest creation.
Released in: June 2009

Avalon was a huge challenge. This game is massive, with lots of features and subtle mechanics to deal, even though the player doesn’t have to worry about what’s going on behind the screen – it’s a casual game after all! In Avalon you play as the fairy queen, and must order your sisters to gather resources for the colony, while also researching and transforming the scenario in order to progress through the story.

It was a very challenging experience, and I got to work on the most varied tasks. I specially enjoy the minigames, which are very different from each other, and their mechanics could easily be on a separate game (with some extra work, of course!). The game script is also something I’m proud of, because it was the first time I wrote a game script, and I liked the outcome – it is very entertaining and it supports the game’s epic, magical feeling.

On the other hand, I think the quests were too random for the player to care: If I could do it again, I’d make it much more straightforward.

Overall, the game is very satisfying and the idea of having a vertical, 2D setting for the flying fairies – along with a nice parallaxed enviroment – was definetlly the right choice for us.

You can check out more screenshots over here:

Genre: Casual Strategy / Bussiness Simulator
Worked with: UIs for the game, art for the Main HUD, collaborations in the game design (minigames) and art direction.
Released in: April 2009

Winemaker Extraordinare is a Casual “tycoon-style” game, where you play as Maria Bellaventura, a stressed city girl who inherits a Winery from her grandfather. You must produce the wines (playing minigames for each step of production), and sell them in order to travel and look for the lost recipes of your grandfather.

In Winemaker I was responsible for creating the user interfaces of the whole game. It was a fully-featured project, with lots of buying/selling options, locations, quests and inventories. The game also features three minigames, each with a different game design. I did wireframes for the whole game before it entered production phase, which was very good because it kept things tight and cohesive. In the middle of the project there was a big change in the game design, so the UI was significantly changed.

This was my first big project in the gaming business, and the outcome was very favorable!

You can see more screenshots (and the wireframes for the screens) here:

Genre: Educational Adventure.
Worked with: Designing and creating the art for the Oracle System (inventory, quest-tracking and infographics). Also designed some of the in-game puzzles.
Released in: Second semester of 2009.

Operation Cosmos is an educational adventure game that teaches physics, mathematics and astronomy to young kids, with a lot of humor and some clever puzzles. In Operation Cosmos I designed the Oracle Interface an art: Our hero, Eco Luz, uses a PDA that stores all information gathered from his journey, as well as his inventory and quest-tracking notes. Inside the Oracle the player can access the Eduks, which are animated infographics that summarize some key concepts needed for puzzle solving (i.e. Velocity, Gravity, Electricity, Volume Calculations, Measure Systems).

I enjoyed the results of this project, the interface is very tidy and easy to access, and the several animated infographics were very understandable.

You can watch more screenshots of the infographics here:

Genre: Time-management
Worked with: Pre-production. Interface solutions, mock-ups and prototypes. Some collaboration in the art production.
Released in: September 2009

Nanny 911 is a casual time-management game based on the famous reality show. I worked in the pre-production of this game, designing interface solutions, wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes. I also played some part on the art production, coordinating the character animation method. My work on Nanny 911 was very brief and way before some critical changes on the project, but I still see some of my UI designs when I look at the screenshots.