Re-imagining JRPG: for Mobile Touch-Screen (Part 1)

This is the fifth post in our multi-part blog on Gamasutra. We're an independently funded development group chasing our dreams.

Check out our previous posts on Gamasutra Blog:

When people say "chasing dreams," it often sounds like acting on impulse. For us, it's actually quite the opposite. We've been wanting to participate for a long time, but never had the savings to do so.

We're jumping into the industry now because it's a great time for mobile. The cost-of-entry is low, the tools are mature, and the mobile space is still an emerging market. Of course, opportunity doesn't come without risk.

We feel that our greatest tool for staying afloat is our heavy focus on design. Focusing on design will help us reduce production costs. Lower costs means we can make more games and learn from our own struggles.

We'll be listing our design and production tricks below. We hope that you'll find our experiences helpful. 

Nameless: the Hackers RPG for iOS

Nameless the hackers brain storm design cyberpunk

Pillars of Design
To us, pillars are unmovable and indestructible concepts that help guide design. These help focus the team on what should take priority. They further narrow the number of possible solutions by providing a mental point of reference. Lastly, they are also great mid-production sanity checks.

It's not easy coming up with pillars. We actually spent many weeks debating back-and-forth. Many times, quoting video game mechanics like judicial precedence, googling business metrics, and also loading up hundreds of games as case-and-point examples. 

We went through several pillars. Some crumbled under pressure, some stood well. 


First Pillar - Touch Specific Interface
This one comes out of our personal frustration with virtual-pads: you can't see, it's not tactile, and it could be so much more. We feel strongly that the touch interface potential has not been fully unlocked in mobile games.

We thought about all the non-game Apps on the AppStore and how innovative many of them were: sliding widgets, scrolling pages, and contextual dragging. By examining iOS Apps like Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, etc... We focused our attention on:

Touch interface design for iOS App

Second Pillar - Cyberpunk Aesthetic
Picking a theme was difficult, but we ultimately settled on Cyberpunk and specifically Hackers. We felt that if we picked fantasy, we would have a hard separating ourselves from other games. At the moment, there are no-other cyberpunk RPG about hackers on the AppStore that we know of.

Another reason why we picked Hackers was because we could leverage my years in Enterprise Security. We had intimate knowledge about real subject matter that might have been compelling to anyone that was bi-curious about the hacking.

Cyberpunk game screenshot

You then make them into targets. They end up sound like:

We tried to do the same thing by picking specific "in-the-moment emotions":

This ended up as the following targets:

Experience Target - Character Focused Story
As an experience goal, we wanted to use the characters within the story as bait to keep the players motivated. This actually moved our focus away from the main story and more onto the personalities and speech of each character.

The design question changed from "How do we make the story more engaging?" to "How can we make the character's reactions to the story more engaging?" This slight difference saved us hours of time (cost) throughout the project.


Experience Target - Explore Close to Real Hacking Culture
For those looking for it, they may have found some interesting things about out game. We have a play on several parodies such as "BitCoins" and "MtGox". We also have real definitions for "Blackhat", "Whitehat", and "Greyhat". We also jump into some plausible scenarios about Digital Forensic Evidence.

Our goal was to write a story that contained just-enough technical detail that an IT Admin would approve, but a non-technical person could understand.




Experience Target - Mobile Easy to Play RPG
Easy-to-Play ended up being a core target. We had to scrap several interesting ideas simply because we couldn't figure out a way to integrate it into the UI. This has two major sub-notes:

We used Storyboards
This was important to our design process because we wanted to pay special attention to how the characters would react to each situation. If the situations were dull, the characters would have less content to react on. If the pacing were awkward, we would have awkward reactions.

Having a storyboard also allowed us to lined up and position each character's emotional milestone within the story.

Mobile Game Design Storyboard

We did the following with each mood-board.

Rapid Mock Prototyping

Prototyping is extremely important for reducing cost. This is significantly easier to do on mobile games than it is on Enterprise Solutions. We just have a huge directory connected to Dropbox, throw a ton of images in there, and then use dropbox's mobile app to view our images directly on the phone. 

Here are some of the failed UI prototypes we didn't use. We prototyped all of these without development hours.

Mobile GUI prototype design

Next Upcoming Topics
We have the following topics we'll be also touching on in a few days. It takes a while to make these, we'll be posting until we're done.

Check out our website: BoxCat Games

Follow us:

@BoxCatLLC
Facebook Page
Join Our Newsletter

Feel free to ask us anything in the comments. =)