Amelia - A Hackathon Game Exploring Aviation
Project details
I had the opportunity of joining a hackathon as the visual/UX designer. Competitors submitted projects (ex: games, websites, plugins) utilizing the principles of aviation.
Drawing from aviation principles and our expertise in computer science and design, we’ve brought to life Amelia - a game that integrates all of these elements. We placed 1st place overall out of 100+ participants in the CSE Society: Aviation Hack 2023.
My role
Visual Designer
UI/UX Designer
Team
Harrison Chang
Jason Johnson
Neha Chawla
Yuri Kim
Tools
After Effects
Illustrator
Figma
Timeline
1 week
Choose Your Plane!
Pick the plane you want to fly depending on its thrust, weight, and lift!
Land The Plane to Win!
Users select the correct plane based off of a variety of factors in order to win!
Consider the Wind.
Live windspeed readings based on player locations affect the outcome of choices!
Keep Trying Till You Make it!
Unique scenarios and different ways for players to win or lose.
02. DESIGN
Character & Environment
First, our team discussed the personality and branding of our product. I took away the main points from this discussion and sketched out ideas that aligned our ideas. These initial designs were sketched out with paper + pencil, then transferred to Adobe Illustrator for editing.
Game UX & Prototyping
The next step was designing the visual components of the game. After some discussion we decided to create a game that revolved around landing the plane to win!
I designed the new screens and created a high-fidelity prototype to go through with the team. The prototype with updated visual components helped us understand the user flow what our game needed in terms of playability.
Game Mechanics & Balancing
Our next step was to design the game mechanics. To do this I created a chart that showed all of the possible planes and their outcomes.
We felt that the game needed more variation, so we developed an algorithm to fetch current location and wind data (speed and direction) using ipInfo and StormGlass API. We then compared the players’ conditions and their plane choice to preset thresholds to determine the outcome.
Animations & Motion
To make the gameplay more fluid, I animated the outcomes, loading screens, and menu screens using Adobe After Effects. The goal was to create animations that showed the players how their plane of choice interacted with the wind.
