Game Design Portfolio

Mobi-Miners // May 2021

Honours Project @Futureworks School of Media

Mobi-Miners is a mobile game which is presented in the format of most board games. It has a turn-based game flow between multiple players and movement is restricted to a tile grid.

The objective of the game is to explore the game world to locate and mine various minerals, to then sell them and make enough money to achieve victory.

As well as being able to sell the minerals for a profit, different types of mineral can also be used in different ways to provide utility to the player to give them an edge over others. Such as increasing mobility, gathering minerals in a more efficient way, or even sabotaging your opponents!

Visualization Artwork of Mobi-Miners Vertical Slice of Mobi-Miners
On the left is my visualization artwork for Mobi-Miners & on the right is my vertical slice of the game created in Unreal Engine 4.

You can view my Game Design Document for this game Here, or by clicking on the image below:

Project Focus

During the production of Mobi-Miners I focused on the following elements of game-dev and developed my skills within related areas and new game systems:

Technical Design
- From a blank project I created a hex grid game system to handle the generation of world meshes and movement/abilities of the players.
- I researched into hexagonal representation in space and used This online resource of information & pseudo-code to acquire solutions and further understanding of the algorithms needed.
- I worked in Unreal Engine Blueprinting and from this project I learnt a lot more about using functions as well as functions embedded within functions to reduce repeated code for a cleaner and more optimized workspace.
Game Design and UI/UX Design for a specific TA
- I chose a distinct Target Audience at the start of this project and built my Design Pillars around the specific type of player(s) that would play this game.
- The Target Audience consists of those who are technologically challenged and the family members or friends who closely surround these people. An example of this would be a grandparent who sometimes plays card/board games with their children and/or grandchildren.
- In turn the Design Pillars for this game were:
  - Simplicity
  - Exploration
  - Collection
  - Sabotaging
- I iteratively relayed feedback from my TA and other consumers to improve clarity of player interaction through my UI elements as well as correctly portray an understanding of visual game mechanics.
- From designing the game towards simplicity I did find conflict between adding new mechanics to create more engaging and fun experiences compared to leaving the game bare so that it is accessible to my TA. I would love to explore different solutions to issues like this in the future.
- I play-tested games such as Hey that's my fish! with my TA to further understand where their enjoyment in games comes from and even tweak the board game to tailor the experience to their preferences.
Mobile Development
- I learnt the Unreal Engine 4 processes of playtesting mobile builds and managing touch inputs to be able to create a playable build for Android devices.