UX SHOWCASE:
YEAH JAM FURY
Grid Paper To Game Maker
The development story from the Newgrounds flash game to the Steam PC release can and has been told across multiple retrospective articles. This video game was my first personal and professional foray into building an engaging user experience from scratch. Everything surrounding the gameplay, design, and menus were built with the user in mind.
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This showcase details the iteration of the game's menus, accessibility considerations, and finding our audience.
ORIGINS OF YEAH JAM FURY
Yeah Jam Fury started life as a senior exhibition project in college. It was a fully featured video game that intended to explore the essentials of platforming game design. Its game loop, menus, and stage builder were all built around this core focus, and its user experience near guaranteed that the player would also question the essentials of platforming design during play.
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When it was released on Newgrounds, it gained a lot of its attention from the programmer's established fanbase. Greg McLeod was working on Super Smash Flash 2, which attracts players between the ages of 10-18. This audience was our focus when we started development on the remake/sequel, Yeah Jam Fury: U, Me, Everybody.
BUILDING THE NEXT YJF
We collected a lot of data from people playing the game that we wanted to utilize in the new version. The goal was to iterate on our original ideas, now centered around our target audience. Old mechanics and techniques were codified and made easier to execute. More visual indicators were added to the game space to make it easier to understand when a certain strategy is required. The tutorial was further fleshed out and clearly told the player what everything was for.
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Making these functions easier to access and more forgiving allowed us to make the game as a whole a lot more challenging and interesting without sacrificing any of its complexity. Your audience can accomplish more elaborate tasks when they're able to access and understand the tools they have available to them. Accessibility has an immediate visible impact in video games, but this applies to any application or utility with a user component.
SELECT YOUR STAGE
The original menus followed a very basic list structure, except for the Stage Select screen. It utilized a series of numbered tiles the user could tap through that would light up as stages were completed. One of the first iterations of the revised menu was intended to be made smaller on the screen, akin to a keypad, leaving more real estate to show a preview of the level and the player's statistics.
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The problem with the tiles was that you were only able to identify a stage's number and completion status on first glance. Stage titles leave a stronger impression on the user than their order, and so we shifted to a scrolling list of levels that took priority on the screen but still provided room for a visual example of the stage when highlighted.
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We wanted to break all perfectly vertical lines while still providing a simple to navigate list structure. Nearly every column in the game (except for the stage builder) appears on a slant and is flanked by bold colors. The combination is visually striking but still comfortable for a player to understand.
FLOURISHES
A lot of Yeah Jam Fury's appeal comes from its use of primary colors to inform both expectation and function. For instance, Fury is red, bold, and strong, and breaks everything in his path. This isn't as easy for a visually impaired player to pick up on.
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Character silhouettes were made distinct right from the start. Each character is heavily associated with the first letter of their name, and we used those letters as elements within the game space alongside their character's color so that they were visually clear at all times.
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Icons always came with a written subtitle so that a button's function was always clear. While there are certain icons that are accepted as understood by an entire audience, the added clarity ensures that the game is playable outside of the time period it was released in, and potentially to a wider audience than anticipated.