Protothon 2024 had 4 different tracks: Classic, Enterprise, Space & Time, and Gaming. Something that brought my group together was our love for video games. For many of us, this was our first hackathon, and we wanted to do something fun— naturally we decided to participate in the Gaming Track.

In order to create an engaging and replay-able game, there were many ideas and themes our team needed to be mindful of as well as design for. For example:

➺ Storytelling of Game's Story: Does the player have a backstory? What is their mission?
➺ Environment: How does the environment shape the player's gameplay and decisions?
➺ Short Term vs Long Term Goals: What kind of objectives and goals does the play have?
➺ Multiplayer vs Solo Experience: Consider if solo or multiplayer is best for our purposes and how it will affect development of gameplay.
➺ Replay-ability factors: Some elements that promote replay-ability are random events and diverse gameplay paths.

Our initial research began with discovering genres of games that have high replay value, and to compare what features contributed to that.

➺ Roguelikes: Roguelike games have high replay value since they have increasing difficulty with progression and even have progress reset on failure. They also have procedural (random) generation of maps and pathways.
➺ Card Games: Card Games have high replay value due to the high amount of luck involved with players' moves, contributing to diverse gameplays each time.

My role focused on designing the card UI and implementing prototype interactions. Meanwhile, the other designer created illustrative assets, and I collaborated with them to ensure their assets integrated smoothly into the prototype.

In Figma, I utilized components, variants, variables, and Boolean properties for prototyping, allowing players to hover, click, and unclick on cards naturally.

In our prototype, you can also win or lose depending which cards you play. Naturally, the first turn does impact the second turn. Figma's variants and variables allowed us to create different pathways in the same prototype.

➺ Designing a game is much harder than it looks. As a long time gamer, I have so much appreciation for game makers. Trying to design a new and fun game is difficult since there's so many different directions and themes you can go. A good game really requires bringing together different perspectives in order to think through all the different possible choices.

➺ Prototyping a game on Figma is possible. I was always intimidated of game design since the main tool I use is Figma, and I wasn't sure how Figma could create a super interactive and dynamic game prototype where players are constantly making a variety of diverse choices. However, through asking for help from another team member as well as looking online for resources, Figma made Corporate Conquest a visual reality!

This was overall a super fun game project to create with my friends and I'm proud of us for getting first!