Silicon City

Technical designer and developer on this gamified reward system for the Intel® Partner University program.

Studio: Sleeping Giant Games for Ideas Collide & Intel®

Position: Technical Designer

Platforms: PC & Mobile

Engine: Unity

Duration: 4 Months (Oct 2023 - Jan 2024)

All Artistic IP Assets and trademarks used on this page belong to their respective owners and are displayed for portfolio purposes.

What I did

  • Technical Design: Developed easy to use tools for designers to quickly set up content.

  • Programming: Developed key systems to the user’s experience including:

    • Data management, saving, and loading

    • Satisfying feedback for the user’s actions including hovering, clicking, and unlocking rewards.

    • An engaging, interactive tutorial that teaches the user everything they need to know.

  • Prototyping: Created and iterated on prototypes to demonstrate new ideas that enhanced the user experience such as motion graphics in the tutorial that help lead the user’s eye.

  • Collaboration: Worked with art team to iterate on advanced visuals and to maintain the client’s branding guidelines.

The Project

Silicon City was built as a collaboration between Sleeping Giant Games and the marketing agency Ideas Collide as an interactive, gamified presentation of a new rewards platform.

Some of the key systems I worked on include:

  • Interactivity and user feedback

  • Tutorials

  • Data management

A deeper dive into some of these features can be found below!


Gameplay Video

Interactivity

The main reason the client wanted this project to be a game was for it to be fun and engaging to interact with. I achieved this by providing immediate, delightful feedback for all of the user’s actions. Hovering over a building, clicking on it, then unlocking the building are each all important steps the user takes in achieving their goals and should be celebrated.

Tutorials

Because of the broad target audience, the game had to not only be simple to engage with, but also had to quickly and effectively communicate the controls and process the user must engage with. I achieved this by incorporating interactivity and contextual graphics whenever possible. When the tutorial teaches the steps needed to unlock a building, it shows the user what they need to do as lightweight as possible, then asks them to do it themselves, learning by doing and limiting their options of what they can do to what we need them to learn. This included only making the specific building we pointed at clickable or removing the “No” option from the unlock confirmation screen during the tutorial to limit the cognitive load of the user and limit the decisions they have to make.

Data Management

In working with another company to handle data storage and retrieval, we needed a clean way to load user’s data so that when they return they can see everything they already unlocked. This involved building a sophisticated data loading sequence that would return the city to the state that the user left it at the last time they played, regardless of device.

Optimization

In order for the game to load quickly on a website, I needed to ensure the game file size was as small as possible. This involved finding the optimal compression and optimization settings for project files and when creating builds.

Take Aways

  • Experienced collaborating across companies to solve problems, create iterations, and meet the client’s goals.

  • Hardened my skills of making all aspects of a game fun, delightful, interactive experiences.

  • Learned a lot about the fast-paced, collaborative task of building games for corporate clients.