Dissonance

Dissonance is a psychological, puzzle and story driven game.

The resident of this house has passed away, you've been hired by someone unknown to figure out who this person was and how they died.

As a Private Investigator you are expected to deal with all sorts of strange scenarios, but this was a case unlike anything that you have ever seen before.

My Role
UX/UI Designer, Game Programmer & Facilitator

Platform
Unreal Engine

Duration
Eight weeks

Team
6 people

Ideation

In the first week we did brainstorming on what type of genre, mechanics and point of view we wanted to base our game on. The result was horror, puzzle, story driven in a first person view for immersion.

wireframes

Mid-fidelity wireframes. After Crazy 8 and Moodboard I created mid-fidelity for Game Pause and Game Over with the Leaderboard to see how the flow can look like.

Testing & Iteration

I iterated on the Game Over flow as I wasn’t satisfied with the mid-fidelity. I used the same style as the Health Bar sprite I created to have a cohesive design between the sprites. I added a rusty color on the highlighted row to get a complementary color to our base color blue and also to get a more industrial feeling as the game is in a factory (Version 1).

Version 2. We went thorugh the two versions I designed and they thought we should go without a background and only have an outlined border. For my part I thought it would be better to have a filled background so the design are cohesive.

Version 3. After Alpha Feedback from our mentors we iterated the UI:s so it followed the art style of the game. The problem here was we were done with the UI before the level and art design and only saw the Alpha one our before the deadline due to lack of communication between teams.

Unity implementation

After the Alpha I started sketching the tutorial panel. It got easier to do because of the other sprites that was done. I reused the leaderboard background and made it bigger so it could be used as a tutorial panel but also for the other panels, for example the credits.

Due to time limitation I was aiming to do a simple tutorial panel with only images and text. When I started implementing it on Unity, I decided to include short videos in the tutorial to make it more clear for the user how the mechanics work.