Overview
Star Soup games, a team consisting of 7 Cornell students, launched a multiplayer mobile game called Ghosted in June 2021. In this team, my primary role was User Experience Designer.
The lights have gone out and the pals are locked in with a ghost lurking in the rooms. The core vision in this cooperative party game, is that the one player will be the ghost, a mysterious haunting presence intent on spooking all of the pals. The other players will be the pals, cooperating to outsmart the ghost and escape. The ghost must use their individual strategy effectively to haunt down the pals, while the they must explore the mansion, collect batteries, find the exit, and avoid being spooked. Because the pals are working together, vocal communication is integral to eluding the ghost and escaping. The ghost, on the other hand, must outwit and spook the pals before they escape.
Objectives
The primary objective of the three pals is to collect four batteries to charge the teleporter by communicating effectively with their teammates. Pals are savvy with using batteries and can use one to light their current room or use multiple to charge the teleporter. There are a limited number of batteries on the map and disagreement over how they are used can result in defeat. The pals must cooperate to ensure every player goes through the teleporter.
The primary objective of the ghost is to spook or trap all the pals to prevent them from escaping the mansion. The ghost will be completely invisible in the dark and can place traps and spook players as long as they do not interact with light. The ghost player is encouraged to track the pals’ movements to strategize and to decide when to strike. In doing so, the ghost can disorient the pals by shifting their focus from battery collection to protecting one another and use that discord to spook them all. The ghost must act quickly and discreetly and learn the pals’ habits to strike at opportune moments.
User Interface
As a UX and UI Designer, I have, alongside three other designers, worked on the UI of the game. The work regarding the user interface has been done in Figma, and the design team collaborated on completing different tasks. Other than working on UI in Figma, all the designers, including myself, converted those into JSON files for our programming team to use.
Characters
In a designing team, we have collaboratively worked on the design of our characters, their illustration as well as the animation for the spooking (and being spooked) animations. Below are the images of my work done mainly in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, regarding the animation and illustration of our game characters. The animations were created at the earlier stages of the design process for testing purposes. Characters were then later more polished and illustrated.
