Visual Design of Games

Elements of Cheese or Font

Core: Some of the core elements include the word being evaluated, entering “C” or “F” as the input, and getting feedback on whether the answer is correct or incorrect.

Supportive: Some of the supportive elements include a lot of the help text. A few examples are, “Cheese or Font?”, “How to Play”, “Forced Order”, or “Wrong Answers”.

Extraneous: Some of the extraneous elements are those not necessary for gameplay, like the number of plays, the score distribution, and the comments.

Sketches of Cheese and Font

A Proximity Exploration

Above, are 6 sketches I’ve created of the game Cheese or Font. While all of these designs are different, the proximity in each design still makes an impact on how they are perceived. In the top three sketches, the time and score are grouped far apart, while the cheese or font choices are grouped together. This draws the eye to the choices, making them the main element of the sketch. In type sketch #1 and 3, the Cheese or Font choices are separated, which creates the effect of having them no longer be the focus of the sketch. Instead, the time and score are grouped together, creating one designated “control center” to view the stats of the game. We can see that proximity and how we group elements of the game have a big impact on how we view and play the game.

A Beautiful Game

One game that I find visually pleasing is 2048. 2048 was the first and only iPhone game that I’ve ever been hooked on, and I’ll still play it sometimes. It’s a very simple game, and technically can be played forever. But the symmetry in the screen and the overall pleasing nature of sliding blocks together to compress them into a larger number is what keeps me, and many other players, hooked. The designers have followed some basic graphic design principles to create an aesthetic board. The first is grouping the scores on the top right side, in order to create a “control center” corner for players. By taking advantage of proximity, the designers were able to split the screen into the title card, the score corner, and the actual board. Next, the designers made each numbered square a different color from the same color palette, so even when your board was cluttered with squares, it’d be visually pleasing. Finally, the action of combining squares is visually pleasing in itself — when swiping down, each square pops a little bit before combining into one homogenous square. Overall, the symmetry of the board, the grouping and the color palette, all contribute to making it a neat and visually pleasing game to play!