Happy Rails
Happy Rails is a labor of love a software engineer friend of mine wanted to take on for his four year old son. I joined the project right at the beginning to complement his programming expertise and turn his ideas into a relaxing, charming, and cohesive game. As the sole designer for most of the game’s development, I greatly enjoyed, wearing a multitude of necessary hats and learning a variety of tools.
My responsibilities included:
Working alongside product lead on evolving product definition.
Certain shape and color combinations were missing from the UI pack and needed to be created.
Creating icons, logo and some text elements.
Choosing fonts and colors.
Using Unity to add scaling to existing UI elements.
Developing a UI system based primarily on colors and icons.
Keeping UI friendly to a target audience with low technological literacy and low reading comprehension.
Few options per screen
Screens need to be navigable and intuitive without text
Navigation via exploration (world select and level select are my personal favorite screens)
Working with game designers to design and implement UI systems.
Creating user journey maps and menu prototypes
Working with another designer to make animated “papercraft” loading screens.
Level and scene/interaction design for several levels.
