Pompei is a simple barter puzzle game to be played together with friends. Two teams compete to finish two different puzzles with some of their team puzzle pieces mixed in another team's pile. Each team must solve a riddle to get their missing pieces back. The winner is the team that can complete the puzzle the fastest. The game involves teamwork and a lot of discussion on the gameplay. Try the prototype here or scan the QR code below to interact directly with your phone.

Come from our own experience, the Covid-19 pandemic has turned our social interaction into virtual interaction which makes us do so many online meetings. As a person that usually interacts physically with other people, the online meetings that we do every day make virtual interactions become more and more boring. Other than that, we also feel that virtual interactions strained our relationships with some of our friends. It might also be felt by other people. Therefore, we're trying to keep virtual communication interesting and can keep each individual close to their friends even though they can't meet each other physically. Our idea to answer this is by creating a simple game (a game whose gameplay is simple, done in a short time, and can be played even by a non-gamer) that is fun to play together with friends.

Through the design process, we want to find out:

Before doing the discovery process, I built a research plan to help me stay on track with the research goals which are:

The research plan also helps me conduct the research neatly and systematically. To achieve the research goals, I conduct market research, user interviews, and competitive analysis.

What I want to find out by doing market research are:

The market research was done by going through several research and articles on several websites (Business Wire, Daxue consulting, Pocket Gamer, Payhawk, Spotless, and Quantic Foundry). The keyword I use to find these insights are ‘Simple game’, ‘Mini Game’, and ‘HTML5 Game’. I categorized the research findings into several categories.

These research findings are then used as a base for user interviews questions and participants requirements.

After having a background about the simple game industry, I did user interviews to get insights into user motivation, behavior, user preferences in game applications,  as well as to gain insights about users’ pain points in doing virtual communication with their friends. I interviewed 5 participants who are interested in socializing with friends and aged between 16–30 (based on market research insight on the simple game demographic).

I then categorized the findings to ease the insight analysis and draw conclusions on people’s pain points and game preferences to play with friends.

People’s pain points in virtual communication:

Game preferences to play with friends:

I identify the target audience of our game by creating an archetype to represent the key user segments. The archetype was built based on market research and user interviews insights. When creating the problem statement and solution, we refer back to this archetype to see if the ideas addressed our target audiences’ preferences or needs.

After grasp about what people feel about virtual communication and knowing what criteria make a game is fun to play together with friends, I brainstorm the game idea with my teammate.

After some time of brainstorming, we have the idea to turn the consensus process into solving a riddle. So, to get the puzzle missing pieces back, each team has to answer a riddle given by the game correctly. Jump to the next process to see how this is implemented in the game flow 😆

The game flow was created to understand the game mechanics and help in building the design later on. The game flow was created with reference to the existing barter puzzle game rules combined with our imagination on combining it with the riddle idea before.

After done with the game flow, I create a design requirement about what the user can see and do inside the app by looking into the game flow. Then, I paper sketch the design idea I have in mind. Paper sketching eases my design process since I feel freer and it is faster to visualize my design imagination. It also enables me to examine my ideas before digitizing them.

I then use the wireframing process to refine some design ideas on the sketch. This digitally structured version of the sketches also help my UI Designer mate understand the design better and help us focus on the ease of use and the element placement before applying styles.

This is how the design looked after my teammate, Najma, implemented styles, typography, and illustrations on it!

The competition timeline is pretty tight for us to do in the middle of work and the midterm exam at university. So, unfortunately, we don’t have time to gather user feedback once we have done with the design.

We received the judges’ feedback on the presentation day of the competition and they’re liked our visual design a lot. However, there’s one big mistake in our design; the side-by-side view.

In the main game room, we provide a side-by-side view which is more suitable for a desktop view since it will be pretty cramped on a small phone screen. We have considered it before, but we thought that this view will increase the game fun since the competing team can see each other progress, so we keep the design as it is.

If we have more time, we should have conducted usability testing to be able to see the design from the users’ point of view and able to iterate our design to increase usability.