Persona
An arcade game design inspired by Carl Jung’s theory of personality.
Overview
Team Size: personal project
My Role: researcher, sketching, prototyping, visual design
Tools Used: Figma, Adobe After Effect
Duration: 2 weeks
Why I Designed This
During my study in college, I found I often have to spend an hour or more reading relative articles to understand only one theory. For most of the time, I couldn’t understand a theory because I failed to find an example in my life to apply that theory. Therefore, I came up with the idea to embed a theory in a game to deliver the theory together with an example which players could interact with and experience.
Inspiration
After I learned about the idea of Persona from my psychology course, I found it a great idea to be expressed in the form of a game. The interaction between the persona, the consciousness, and the shadow can build an exciting game mechanism -- it helps us to fit in the society while eroding our true personality.
Storyboard
To give my design a certain direction, I draw a storyboard about Mark’s day with persona, and his real thoughts without persona.
Design
Brainstorm
After brainstorming about the relationship between “Persona”, “Consciousness”, and “Shadow”, I found the fast pace of arcade games is the best to express the high frequency in changing personas and decided to use the change of color and emotion to represent the change of persona.
Referenced Games
After I found a certain direction for my design, I started searching for relative games, and learned from them, which helped me in deciding the artistic style and mechanism of my game.
Sketches
To assist my future design, I sketched out several pictures to remind me of the main mechanism and screen layout.
Main Interaction:
System Flow Chart
Wire-frame
Elements
When designing the elements in the game, I wanted to immerse my players into the experience of “Mark” through first-person perspective. Therefore, I used the simplest line & dot for main character’s emotion in order to depict the falsity of his own emotion through Mark’s eye, and used real-world emotions as reference for public balls’ emotion to depict the veracity of others’ emotion through Mark’s eye.
Final Outcome
Gaming Experience
Core Mechanism
Keep switching outer layer color to fit into other balls, while collecting white ball to avoid being overwhelmed by dark inner layer.
Difficulty
Representations & Explanation
