Activity System (Concepting)

How can I add a feature to SugarVita that adds more diversity to the game, so players can more accurately simulate their daily lives?

My second main design challenge is: "Build upon an existing game made for diabetes patients with new features, so that the patient can get a more personalized experience and learn more whilst playing the game while also making the game more fun to play". In this entry, I describe my brainstorming process to achieving a feature that single handedly could make this a reality.

Research Methods

Field

Explore user requirements

The first and most important thing is knowing what's important for players. I talked about it with Harm and my conclusion was that the game right now only has simple healthy options like eating (mostly healthy), walking and taking medicine even though most patients don't necessarily want a perfect blood sugar level, but to live as close to normal without their blood sugar levels spiking too high. This is a big difference and it inspired me to think about adding unhealthy, but fun things like going to a party and eating cake + drinks. By doing these things a player would need to compensate for it before and after the activity.

Library

Game analysis

I looked at the current layout of SugarVita and how I might be able to use some the UI or other features to my advantage to add activities such as going to a party as described above. In SugarVita you have a bag that can open and close and within it you have the option to do everything from walking to eating. I chose to have this as the spot where to select an activity.

When you select "Snack", you get the option to select multiple snacks as shown below. I could use this to list all my activities and make it easy for the player to select the activity they wish to do.

Task analysis

Now that I know what I want the player to be able to do and how they can select it, I need to think about what actually happens when the players presses the button of an activity. There are 2 main options here.

Implement them the same way a walk is implemented. This would mean nothing visible happens, but your blood sugar levels would change the next few hours based on the activity you chose.
Create a brand new system which would visibly activate the activity and making it so the player can't land on tiles that wouldn't make sense like mowing a lawn while you're at a party.

I talked about it with Pieter and Harm and especially Pieter really liked the idea of having some different maps for variety's sake. It also gives me the possibility to add special tiles related to the actual activity like everyone chugs their drink at a party or something like that. I decided to start with 2 activities.

Forest walk. This would replace the current walk feature.
Party. This would give the player the option to simulate something fun, but unhealthy to see what it does to their blood sugar level.

Results & Validation

The result is a well thought out plan to show Harm and Pieter in the form of Trello (see picture below), so they could give us their opinion about it. After showing it to Pieter and Harm, they were excited by it especially because they liked to have some diversity in maps and this feature is perfect for that. Harm also believed that it would benefit the players if they would have more options within the game to accurately simulate someone's daily live.

Usage

The plan is used as a basis for how to implement the feature, on both a conceptual and a technical level. More on this can be found in the next entry: Activity System (Implementation).