Personas and Paper Prototype of the game

In this section, I will talk about the personas and paper prototype that we created for this project. I will also talk about how we came up with personas, how we decided who is going to be our target audience for this game and I will also show the process of creating personas. For this project, we came up with two personas and one final persona. From the research we done for this project, we got the information that majority of people who would use our game are between ages of 18 to 24 and 24 to 35. Based on that data, we decided to focus on creating one persona that will represent a minor and one that will represent young adult , and final persona will be in between when it comes to age but with mixed characteristics of persona 1 and 2. When it comes to Paper Prototype of the game, I will show two version of paper prototype and explain the functionality of the game.

Persona 1 – Tom Byrne

First persona that we created is called Tom Byrne, he is sixteen year old Leaving Cert student from Dublin. While doing our research, we were not allowed to collect data from minors because of ethical reasons, we agreed on creating one persona that will be underage because we showed some of our ideas to our younger family members and they seemed to like it, and also, we believe that teenagers (from 13 to 17) would be very interested in our game.

As I already said, Tom Byrne is a sixteen year old student from Dublin. Tom is goofy, extrovert and funny. He does not have a part-time job because he is very focused on his studies. When it comes to his hobbies he plays rugby, games and spends quite a lot of time on social media. He lives with his parents and feels a lot of pressure from them because they want him to do well in his exams. His goals are to finish his exams, get into college ,play more games with friends again and spend more time with them. Tom is good when it comes to understanding technology, as he plays games a lot and uses a lot of other different software. His gaming skills are excellent, as he plays a lot of different games and understands them easily, as well as his social skills, since he enjoys playing multiplayer games and likes to spend time with his friends overall. Beside all that, Tom is under a lot of stress. His Leaving Certificate exams are this year and he is forced to put his hobbies to the side. Tom needs something that will help him relax, have his attention and would not take much of his time. Our game, Final Saviour, would be perfect for Tom since it does not require from user to spend to much time on playing it, but it is also interesting and will have his full attention, so hopefully, it will help him forget about his problems for a while.

Persona 2 – Mark O’Connor

For our second persona we created Mark O’Connor, 22 year old programmer. From our research for this project, Mark falls into the group of people between ages of 18 and 24, young adults, with possible gaming history, who would like to play our game. Although we are mainly targeting teenagers, we believe that young adults would also be a good target audience since most of them were teens when two-dimensional games were at it’s prime, and would appreciate something that would remind them of their childhood.

Mark is 22 years old postgraduate student of Computer Science and is very into playing games. He has been playing games ever since he was a child. His favorite game is Resident Evil, but he also enjoys two-dimensional games like Rayman – his favorite game from childhood. He still plays a lot of games. He is very familiar with different styles of game design and thinks that graphics and game art are really important. He mostly plays games on his professional gaming PC and prefers playing it alone rather than with his group of friends. His game might be of interest to him as he likes to try new and different games and explore different game stories and characters. Mark needs that will he find interesting and new or will not remind him of the stuff he played before. Possibly even something that will make him research game style and design and hope for more of games like that to come out. Our game would be great for Mark because it is created in two-dimensional mode, and would remind him of his younger days, also the story of the game might be interesting to him.

Persona 3 (Final Persona) – Ally Jameson

Persona of Ally is a mix of both our two previous personas – Tom and Mark, but also she is a person for herself. We have decided to create a female persona as today, it is not only boys who play games and who are interested in how games work, but girls too. Persona like Ally, would not only represent someone who is interested in games, but also the overall art and how is it designed.

Ally Jameson is a 23 year old three-dimensional model designer from Liverpool, United Kingdom. She studied Game Design and Concept Art and is very creative person. Ally is living with her husband and works as Concept Artist. She is very honest, critical, artsy, outgoing and creative. Her hobbies are drawing, painting,hiking, gymnastics and playing games. Her goal is to work on herself and become better artist than she is now, as well as to find new art that will inspire her. She is good at both technology and gaming, and her social skills are impressive. Our game would be interesting to someone like Ally as it has very nice and specific design and it would probably be something that she would find nice, cute and inspiring.

Paper Prototype of the game

For creating paper prototype of our game, we highly referred to the research we done for this project, focusing on what users would like to see from our game. In this section I will show three paper prototype iterations done for this project. First one will show our idea before we took into account the research and what users want. Second one will show iteration done based on user information and third one, will also focus on user wishes but would not include many details – as we wanted to see what would user get from it, and if user thinks the same as us, prototype is successfully created.

Prototype 1 – Before user research

Images above are showing the very first prototype iteration of our game. This prototype was created before we even done the research for this project and it represented our initial idea for the game – how we, as developers, would like it to look. Our initial prototype was representing a game that would allow user to choose between three characters to play – Forest Spirit, Guard and Little Forest Fire. Depending on what player user chooses we had an idea to create a completely different game plays for them, so users would have different experiences. From our research later, and discussing our skills when it comes to programming such complex game play, we have decided no to include features mentioned above in our game, since it would take too much time and also users prefer something simpler.

Prototype 2 – Reflecting on user research

Second iteration of the prototype focused highly on what users want to see from our game. As I said before, we decided to remove features such as three players choice and different game play experiences, so looking at this prototype you can see that we decided to stick with the character of grumpy guard as protagonist of our game. We named him Sergio and decided to make him a very grumpy little man (Image 1, from the gallery above). As we can also see from the images above, game had a completely different title in this prototype and then we decided to change it from Glorious Savior to Final Savior. We also explained his objectives in the game and how will he succeed in them. If we look at the gallery above we can see that this prototype iteration is very detailed and gives users a complete explanation of how game works and what are the possible outcomes if scenarios end up different from what we, as developers are planning to make them look. In our opinion, this seem like a nice prototype since we are creating a game and users do need to know how to play it (have manual for it) in order to do well in a game play. On the other hand one of the lecturers suggested us how we should focus on creating a prototype that will allow user to figure out by himself/herself how to navigate the game and not know what will happen in each scene and this, will lead us to our third and final prototype iteration.

Prototype 3 – Final Prototype

For our final prototype iteration we have decided to created a little booklet, that will work on a principle of record cards. Page one of booklet is a brief explanation of what it is and what will user see while flicking the pages. When user opens the booklet first thing he/she sees is just an image, no explanation. Then user would be asked what he/she thinks it is what will happen next and so on. If users explanation matches ours we would say we are getting good information from user and if not, we would consider changing stuff later to make it more easier for user to figure out what it is and how it works. Then we would ask user to flick paper again and see the explanation of previous image, so now user knows as well what is going on and can see if he/she was correct.