COGNITIVE DESIGN PROCESS

HMW research based on social media problem statements revealed opportunity to capitalize on user desires for actually social forms of media. Before any ideas were drawn, we talked about ideal behavioral results and mapped existing solutions by their strategies, both effective and ineffective.

Before any fancy design work, performers have needs and audiences have capacities. My inventory management system was customizable to each event's scale and staff experience, ensuring smooth operations whether for 50 or 5000 attendees to deliver quotes, stage and flow layouts, and general end-to-end strategy resources.

I've iterated on novel methods of touchscreen interaction to understand their impacts on users and avoid growing comfortable with arbitrary convention while understanding its utility.

After creating an initial storefront designed for throughline ingress/egress, rapid complete layout alterations were necessary due to high demand. By reemphasizing different products through tailor-made solutions, we maintained cohesion while achieving near total sellout and engagement of over twelve continuous hours.

The core problem I found was players were optimizing away fun in the late-game by upgrading one guard and never exploding it, rather than diversifying and adapting as intended. This was counteracted in simple ways: first, making game-feel for lower upgraded explosions feel more powerful; second, adding a 'pentagon' enemy who destroys high-level guards; and third, flipping the shop economy to make cheap upgrades the most useful- encouraging all guards to be upgraded.

With a core gameplay loop of forbidding then coaxing behaviors (like the titular cursing), edge-case players got stuck in negative feedback loops of refusing to engage with the group. I added the 'quest' mechanic, leveraging the fantastical and ridiculous vibe, which required environmental and social engagement- beyond breaking quiet loops, this added memorable moments and further coaxed laughter and cursed exclamations.