GUI Review: Baby Rush - Cognitive Psychology

I'm finally back for the final entry for Baby Rush's GUI review, talking about the cognitive psychology.
This entry will be covered in three parts: Visual perception, Memory, Attention and Metacognition.

(Click the images to enlarge!)

1. Visual perception:




Menu Buttons



Level Buttons and Achievements

As shown in the images, buttons and achievements have different designs and they are further classified in different types with different colour schemes. For buttons, the menu buttons have a white colour scheme while the level buttons have a blue one. And for the achievements, the ones which you have unlocked will be coloured while the the ones which have not been unlocked will remain black-and-white. Using different colours for things in the same group will let the player classify them into futther groups on his own (unconsciously).

2. Memory + Metacognition:




When the baby requests something, 2 pop-ups with the same item will show up on top of the baby and the player character: the blue pop-up top of the baby and the red one on top of the player character. The pop-ups is shown in this way that the player will believe that they are related to one another and the item shown in the pop-ups will try to relate the player to a certain task. Like for example, this image show that the baby is crying for milk. The milk bottle in the pop-ups will try to remind the player that the player needs to put the baby to the feeding chair and bring milk from the kitchen and feed it to it. This scenario also applies to real-life so the player would naturally know how to react to the baby's requests.

3. Attention:


When the player lets the baby wait for too long while doing a certain task, the baby would start crying and the game would start playing a crying sound of the baby. This feedback would notify the player and try to urge to the player to do something about the situation and fasten up.


So this concludes my final entry on the GUI reviewon Baby Rush. :)

GUI Review: Baby Rush - User Consideration

Hi guys! I'm here for the second post again.
This time we will be touching on Redemption Studio's game, Baby Rush again.
But this time, we will be talking about the user consideration of the game.

First of all, let's take a look at our first main inspiration of Baby Rush, Diner Dash.
Same as Baby Rush, Diner Rush is a strategy game and its main audience are female working-adults.
Diner Dash's UI make use of bright, distinctive colours and the icons are all stylised in a very cute style.

After researching Diner Dash and many other similar games, we headed on to looking into the package designs of some baby items such as diapers and milk bottles. This way, we could finalise which kind of fonts we could use and what kind of art style we could pursuit for Baby Rush.

For the baby satisfaction bar, we wanted something simple yet easy to understand how it works. The requests made by the baby and the items needed for the players to proceed are all catagorised into blue and red pop-up bubbles respectively. The timer design is a simple digital clock as my producer believed that having a real object in a game made the timer easier to understand thus it would be easier to interact this way.



For the buttons' design, we had to consider about the backgrounds first so it would not blend into it too much. Being outlined and blended with 3 very close (but distinguishable) colours highlight the buttons out from the backgrounds.

To compile and summarise the GUI Design for Baby Rush;
1. The heavy use of bright colours makes players easier to remember as we tried to make every GUI as unique as possible.

2. Some GUI being able to be referenced to real-life objects makes things easier to learn, understand and interact.
3. Relevance of the Theme and usage of simple, bubbly yet cute style for the GUI makes the user satisfaction criteria met.

In conclusion, I would say that the basic criteria of Baby Rush's GUI has been made. But I believe that one of the improvements for the GUI we can do is the baby satisfaction bar design as it is a bit too simple and unappealing to the female adults.

GUI Review: Baby Rush (ベビーラッシュ)

Well here is it my first GUI review!
Today I will be reviewing Baby Rush.
It is a strategy 2D flash game made by my team, Redemption Studios (リデンプシオンスタジオ) during last semester.

(Click images to enlarge!)

Main Menu:

This is the main menu, where players first start off at. There are 3 buttons: Play (To play the game), Instructions, and Credits.


Level Select:

After players select the Play button, they can choose 1 of the level buttons to start playing, or choose the Return button at the right bottom side to return to the main menu.


A Level Button will enlarge when you move your mouse over it, telling you where the mouse is on which level button.

Gameplay:

During the gameplay, the player serves as a baby daycare worker, carrying the baby around the daycare to satisfy it by doing certain actions such as feeding it milk and giving it a bath, shown by the pop-ups from the baby and the furnitures. In early levels, there is a tutorial which guides the players through non-diegetic windows.

The game objective is to pacify the baby by doing certain tasks until it gets tired and sleepy, shown by the decreasing blue bar on the top left corner (not present in tutorial). If the player lets the baby wait for too long, it will start crying, alarming the player and raise their urgency, and a red Anxiety bar will appear on top of the baby and will slowly fill up. When the Anxiety bar reaches a certain level, the player will lose the game.







Pause Menu:

The player can press the P button to pause the game. The pause menu has 2 buttons : Level Select and Instructions. This allows the players to quit and choose a new level or refer to the instructions at anytime.



Win Scene:

After the player clears a level, the game will lead them to this scene, notifying them that they have passed the level. The player can then choose to proceed to the next level or return to Level Select to choose another level.



Lose Scene:

After the player loses a level, the game will lead them to this scene, telling them that they have lost the level. The player can then choose to restart the level or return to Level Select to choose another level.



Ending Scene:

This is the ending scene, which notifies the players that they have completed the game.



Achievements:

The icons at the right of the level buttons are achievement icons. They are all black-and-white at default. After the player unlocks an achievement in a certain level, the icon besides that will turn into the coloured version.



And the credits:

Redemption Studios (リデンプシオンスタジオ)

PS: Ng Kewei, my senior, did 70% of the entire game's GUI by the way, while I only did 30%.

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