Now that the beautiful backgrounds are drawn and the launch features are almost complete for Interrupting Cow Trivia, we’re finally turning our attentions to the game’s visuals. If you played the ICT alpha, you would have found a fully-functional game with no graphics. This is the story of how we got from there to here, and the decisions that informed the look of the game.

A Different Kind of “M” for Mature

Through early play-testing, i realized that young people don’t like trivia. Trivia’s no fun when you don’t know any of the answers. And the younger you are, the less likely you are to know stuff. Based more on a hunch than actual market research, we decided that our target audience was this guy:

Cliff Clavin is male, middle-aged, a baby boomer, and thinks he knows a lot of stuff about stuff. Cliff is our power-user – the guy who’s going to discover Interrupting Cow Trivia and burn through all of the content in a day.

Here’s another type of customer we suspect will be interested in the game:

These are college-aged smarty-pantses who play weekly trivia at the pub, but can’t always afford the six-dollar beers and the time away from the dorm.

Design by Hunch

Put that all together, and we came up with the idea to stage Interrupting Cow Trivia at a restaurant, to re-create that social pub feel. Specifically, it’s a 50′s-style diner, in a nod to the baby boomers. And not a grungy, dilapidated diner like something out of Fallout or Bioshock. It’s a shiny, sparkly 50′s diner in its heyday. We hope that the theme will make older players feel welcomed and comfortable, while younger players will dig it as a retro curiosity.

So a 50′s-style diner needs a 50′s-style User Interface (UI … or “MOO-I”, as it says in the title of this post, because we’re under contract to include at least one awful cow pun in every ICT Designer Diary entry). We carefully studied menu designs from retro 50′s diners, and put this together in our first attempt:

We actually started to build the game with this look – there are vestiges of it in the current alpha version. But after completing the painted backgrounds of the game’s diner, we realized that we needed to ratchet the visuals up a few notches. We took some cues from the A&W chain of retro burger joints, and various other sources. Here’s a taste of how it’s coming along:

This has the right amount of “pop”, both visually and stylistically. Expect the beta version of ICT to be packed with fun, bubbly 50′s UI that’ll make players want to stay in the game longer, and will encourage players to buy an ICT Diners Club Card for some groovy perks.

Moo.

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.

Ryan Henson Creighton

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