Toxic Buff Animations

Overview

The following page discusses the design decisions/ components behind the toxic buff animations that has been implemented within the game.

Key Concepts for Integration into Game

In sprint one it was found that Atlanteans naturally inherited an increase in stamina, durability and damage whistly there were within the ocean. This concept is closely linked to the concept of buffs. It was decided that buff would add great value into the game as it would make the design of the game have more success criteria. This is because having the buff adds more another layer on how the player can attack the enemies.

The design ideation around buffs was to make it more of a comedic aspect to fit into the story of the game. Instead of using ocean element as found in background research we decided to choose elemental buff to the nightmares of a plumber. For the poison buff, we have decided to incorporate a toxic waste image to relate to.

Design Inspiration

From research it was found that toxic waste is the most common theme in horror stories of plumbers. >

Upon initial research of the word “toxic” it is commonly visualised by green, purple, and yellow. To further on from this research was done on how it is represented within society, the field of games, film, and television. Within film and television characters that are can be classified as a villain or in other terms “toxic” have a colour scheme of green. This is the same within games that utlise the colour green to visuale toxic waste.

A colour scheme was derived from this, as seen in the colour scheme section below.

User Testing

During this phase of the design, I wanted to attain more information on the toxic buff colour that should be used within the game. Furthermore, I wanted attention details if the colour represented anything remotely close to that of toxic.

User feedback data can be found here.

Overall user testing results came back with positive feedback saying that the colour scheme was great. Although purple was added to the prototype tested on, it was interesting to see how user themselves suggested the purple colour to be used without seeing the prototype. No changes were made to the prototype as user feedback confirmed the colour scheme will look realistic and ultimately, provide more value towards the game within the design aspect.

Colour Scheme

Before the creation of any sketches, initial user testing was completed and results from the raw data was analysed to attain a better understanding of what colour schemes users most related to when viewing each buff. The following is the finalised colour scheme for the toxic buff designs created.

Sketches

A general checklist was also created to the main necessities that each toxic weapon buff needed:

Incorporate purple into the swing
Make the waste look as if it is flowing over the weapon
Have green bubbles to show the toxic reactiveness

Final Design

In terms of future iterations for the toxic waste buff, it would be interesting to visualise the attack's impact on the enemy. This would make not only the attacks but the buff “powerful” effect clear and hence realistic.