Art Stars
My fourth-year university project, combining the disciplines of graphic design, architecture and product design. Art Stars is a mobile game that ties-in with a colourful park that you interact with through Augmented Reality.
In the final year of my bachelor’s degree, before writing your final thesis, one must create a project overarching each of the disciplines of design that are taught in the degree. For me, this project was Art Stars. I conceptualized a mobile game where you can colour-in a real-world play area through your smartphone camera in AR. In this project, I designed the graphic style and characters, the real-world space the game would take place in, and a product to bridge the gap between game and reality.
To bring the world to life, I designed these characters called Chromies, living blobs of paint with different traditional gameplay roles. These are simplified player avatars meant to be a blank slate showing some personality purely through shape language. Their goal is to take over the park and paint it in their own colour, visible through your smartphone camera.
Sketches conceptualizing the Chromies, making an emphasis on distinct character silhouettes.
I also wrote a profile for each character, describing their role in the world and their gameplay in more detail.
When it comes to the architectural side of things, I picked a real-life location near my university campus, an unused plot of land in a residential area. I included a rest and information area in addition to the main play area. Within those constraints, I started off creating some cardboard models to get an idea of the space and then moved on to creating the whole park in CAD 3D software.
Finally, for the product design segment of the project I created a haptic gameplay accessory. This Art Blaster, modelled after toy guns like Nerf or Super Soaker, can hold your smartphone during a match and provide several benefits. You can keep track of your ammo and special attack meter on a small screen, smack the star on the side to use your special move once it’s charged-up and glowing, and even add mounted accessories on the rail in front. The Blaster also provides haptic feedback with subtle vibrations when shooting and hitting players or surfaces.
