Through gaming consoles like the Xbox and Nintendo Switch, we can perform actions beyond human limits with the press of a button. But what if, instead of just playing a character, you could actually be them?
Our team set out to create an immersive game experience, using the devices you already own.
At a glance
Objective
Design a new way to play.
Timeline
24-hour hackathon at Northwestern University, Wildhacks 2023
Award
Best Design out of 45 projects
Team
Development
Yvan Chu, Cindy Hu, Sean Rhee
(check them out here!)
Design
Emily Chen (me)
My Role
Designing the user flow of our game, graphics and UI to hand off to our engineering team.
Try it out!
You will need a desktop and a phone. (Sorry, our game is only compatible with iPhones for now!)
Open with desktop browser
7 Days
Building our team
Cindy, Yvan and I teamed up on the premise that we wanted to build a fun project for our last college hackathon.
We didn’t do much individual brainstorming prior, wanting to see what ideas would strike when we came together and (hopefully) surprise ourselves with the outcome.
We met Sean through the Wildhacks Discord server and decided to team up based on our shared goal of having fun.
24:00
Brainstorming ideas
Next came the difficult part: deciding on an idea. From past experience, we knew that even for a project that we would only be working on for 24 hours, it was important that we found an idea that everyone on the team felt excited about.
After struggling to come up with ideas together, we individually brainstormed ideas, and then pitched them to the group.
With a vote, we settled on the NES/Wii Online idea.
21:00
There were multiple ways we could go about designing an experience for interactive, web-based gaming. Yvan had experience working with iPhone gyroscope and accelerometer data, so we thought we would play with the movement of the phone as a controller (similar to a Wii remote). Somebody proposed a Flappy Bird alternative: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could move by literally flapping like a bird?”
We narrowed down on some possibilities based on a few key priorities:
Immersion - To give players the most immersive flying experience, they could hold one phone in each hand (one per ‘wing’) that would control the direction of their flight.
Realism - Very few people carry two smartphones, but we could create a cooperation challenge by creating a two-player game, where each person holds a smartphone to control one wing of the bird.
Deciding on a concept
Winner!
Access and Simplicity - Allowing our game to be played only in pairs of two seems pretty limiting. We could allow more flexibility by having a single player control a bird on their own, and implement a multi-player mode for groups, where players can compete with others.
Two-player, one bird concept
Competitive multiplayer concept
18:00
At this point, we began working individually to lay down the foundation of our game and experience. I was responsible for designing the user flow and UI.
First, the flow. With our outcome in mind, I created a step-by-step list of what players would need to do in order to play our game:
Open their desktop and navigate to the game page.
Connect their smartphone to the current game.
Add their name.
Begin the game.
View instructions on how to play.
Play the game.
Restart the game.
I continued to revise these steps as I mapped out the flow on wireframes.
User Flow
16:00
For the corresponding UI, I sketched out a few possibilities, making adjustments to make the flow as simple and intuitive as possible.
Prototyping
6:00
With our remaining time, I created some avatars in Figma that would allow players to personalize their experience.
One nice thing about Figma was that with the demo feature, I could quickly see if the transition between frames seemed natural and make adjustments as needed.
Graphics
Result
0:00
Demo coming soon!
Reflection
This was one of my favorite projects I’ve been a part of!
As someone who has always been intimidated by competitions, it was rewarding to finish my last college hackathon with a little more confidence. This experience in particular reminded me how valuable it can be to get myself in the mindset of committing to a decision, learning from it, and making adjustments, instead of deliberating endlessly before each move.
It was an awesome experience to work on a challenging, yet fun and rewarding project with such an amazing team. I hope you have as much fun playing the game as we did making it!
