FUTURE ARTS CENTRE 🎭
Future Arts Centre Game Trailer
In collaboration with The Embassy of France in Canada, Art of Festivals, and Alliance française de Vancouver, Team Nuage is developing a serious game that reflects the experience of what an arts centre can be and should be.
This future-facing choice-based digital simulation game will provide different scenarios and management cycles of a fictional multidisciplinary arts venue to stimulate critical thinking, identify future trends and provide a discussion basis for change management - The future of this cultural hub is in your hand !
This future-facing choice-based digital simulation game will provide different scenarios and management cycles of a fictional multidisciplinary arts venue to stimulate critical thinking, identify future trends and provide a discussion basis for change management - The future of this cultural hub is in your hand !
Future Arts Centre can be play here
Project by Team Nuage, Master Students from Centre for Digital Media:
Chalita Termpaiboon (Me) - UI Artist, UI Technical Artist.
Asher Gao - Game Designer
Jisoo Shin - Project Manager and Visual Designer
Kennedy Kan - 3D Artist
Mars Balisacan - Director and Game Programmer
Sofie Nielsen - Game Programmer
Duration: 3 months
Tools: Figma, Adobe Suite, Miro, Unity
Date: 2022
A Brief from Client:
Objective: Serve as an interactive training tool to educate culture professionals and leaders in the complexities of running an art centre and stimulate critical thinking and discussion around the current and future role of arts centres.
- Open source choice-based simulator game as training/coaching tool
- Ability to replay again to explore strategies (educational)
- Interconnected, realistic scenarios (relatable)
- Take time to make decisions (thought-provoking)
Need to have 5 main categories:
1. Policy
2. Artistic Development
3. Programming
4. Governance
5. People
Target Group: Culture professionals & leaders (maybe non-gamers)
Introduction
The introduction part features starting page, main menu, and some information to be fill in.
There is also some back story to onboarding the player to the game.
There is also some back story to onboarding the player to the game.
Initial Strategic Choice
There will be five questions under each category, so there will be a total of 25 initial strategic choices for players to choose from in this phase. Each initial strategic choice will have two options (OpinionA and OpinionB）for the player to choose from. All the player's decision will determine the starting status of their Future Arts Centre.
Cycle
After the player finish ISC, they will start the game immediately. In the game play, there will be 2 categories of event which are Main Event, directly caused by the Strategic Choice. The player need to finish all the main events in this cycle to move forward to the next cycle. Side Events Triggered by an indicator reaching a specific value (low value for now). After the player finish all the main events, they will encounter an event with social impact (ESI) which allow the player to rethink and plan their ISC to improve their status.
HUD
HUD - main event
HUD - main event 2 After Clicking
HUD - side event
esi - breaking news
esi - headline
esi - choice selection
esi - confirm all
level up
Ending
After 8 cycles of the game, the player will reach to an ending where they can see the summary of their performance. They can also winning an award if they are done well in any categories
Process
As a team, we developed the game system together at first to figure out what needs to be create as the assets and screen types.
To conclude, the game is divided into 4 parts:
1️⃣ Introduction
2️⃣ Initial Strategic Choice (ISC)
3️⃣ Cycle
4️⃣ Ending
We brainstormed for the look and feel for the game. The client didn't have any specific design in mind as the gave us creative freedom 😄 We wanted the user experience to be and interactive and easy to navigate around.
Game Flow systerm
Lofi-Wireframe of the game
Low Fidelity Wireframes
We digitized sketches and created low fidelity wireframes to work out the information architecture of each page.
Art Style and Mood board
After we finalized all the pages we need, we also explored what kind of art style that can be used for the game. We took a look at a lot of game UI and other references from art gallery or community centre as inspirations. In the end, the client chose the option 3 - futuristic, cool tone, contrast for the final design.
Mood board: Art Style + In game Art Asset + UI
Intro Screen exploration
In game UI in 3 diferent style
The Outcome
The final design reflects the futuristic design as we moving forward with the idea of 'future'. We used blue color, modern fonts, round edges hexagon shape as our key elements for the design.
In production process, I also helped with integrating all the screens and design assets into Unity by using Doozy UI Manager, TextMeshPro, micro animation UI animator, to speed up the process for the developers.
For the final presentation, we went a little extra. Our team also decided to create a video to explain about our journey and challenges of the project in comic style 😄 I had so much fun working with Jisoo and Asher on this video !
Take Away from the Project:
- At first we tried tackling brainstorming and tasks as a whole group, but it only resulted in long meetings with debates after debates. It worked much better when we divided up the work and put trust in our team members to do what they do the best.
- We also waited on the client to get all our content, but we realized later that we could use placeholder text to get on with the development. It was also difficult to lock down the content with minor revisions that kept coming through. So it was a good thing we had an extra week in case we needed more time.
- For our team, our developer hosted a Unity workshop for designers and it helps speed up the process. Designers who never used Unity before like me also get to learn how to integrate assets in Unity, and Developers can just hook everything up right after that.
- For both our team and clients, English is not our first language so it would be good to align on the same terminology in the beginning to avoid any confusion. It also helps to explain things in simplified terms.
- I was a bit afraid to try our own ideas and relied on the client’s approval. If I had more time, I would love to add those extra ideas to make our game even more fun. What the clients need is not necessarily what they ask for, so that’s where we can step in.
