Feed the bear Building Adventure, a Puzzle Game for Winter-Ready Bears Feed the Bear is a charming puzzle game where you help a bear gather enough food before hibernation. Match food icons to solve puzzles and prepare the bear for winter. Quick thinking and strategy are key as you race against time to ensure the bear is well-fed! Perfect for kids and puzzle enthusiasts alike. Year: 2020 Project Type: Coursework Produced: Independently Feed the bear Building Adventure, a Puzzle Game for Winter-Ready Bears Feed the Bear is a charming puzzle game where you help a bear gather enough food before hibernation. Match food icons to solve puzzles and prepare the bear for winter. Quick thinking and strategy are key as you race against time to ensure the bear is well-fed! Perfect for kids and puzzle enthusiasts alike. Year: 2020 Project Type: Coursework Produced: Independently Objective Create a game concept centered around bears, designing the primary icons and interface to visually represent the game’s theme. Research Research is essential to my design process, helping me understand the subject and audience. I start with a clear plan to guide a focused approach. This market understanding and awareness of trends shape my design decisions, ensuring they are relevant and effective. You can view the complete market research here. Research Guide Bears Research Accordion Title Accordion Content Research Goals Learn about bears and the foods they eat Learn about the target audience of Feed the Bear Research Questions Who is the target audience? What are some foods that bears eat? What are some common behaviors of bears? Methodologies Primary Research Understand what bears eat and their behaviors Learn about the target audience and what appeals to them Insights Black bears are very opportunistic eaters. Most of their diet consists of grasses, roots, berries, and insects. They will also eat fish and mammals—including carrion—and easily develop a taste for human foods and garbage. Bears who become habituated to human food at campsites, cabins, or rural homes can become dangerous and are often killed—thus the frequent reminder: Please don’t feed the bears! (National Geographic) Game Demographics According to the survey, puzzle and strategy games are most popular with both groups, with 77 percent of parents playing and 78 percent of children. Adventure games are the second most popular genre with kids, followed by simulation and building games in third. (Gamasutra) Accordion Title Accordion Content Mind Map Taking the HMW questions, I started my brainstorming process to come up with solutions for each of these problems. I decided to use mind mapping so that I could quickly generate as many ideas as I could. This is an extract of my brainstorm results. Insights Food Preferences: Bears enjoy a variety of foods, including fish, honey, and vegetables, which can be integrated into the game’s concept. These food types can serve as key elements in the gameplay, where players “feed the bear” different items as they progress. Target Audience: The primary audience for the game is young children who are already familiar with and enjoy vibrant, playful, and colorful games like Mario Kart. The design should focus on creating a fun, engaging experience that resonates with this demographic. Design Elements: The game’s design should emphasize playfulness, using friendly, vibrant, and colorful visuals. Circular and round shapes could be incorporated to enhance the approachable and fun atmosphere, making the game more appealing to kids. Game Style: The mood and style of popular games like Mario Kart can be adapted to fit the “Feed the Bear” concept, combining playful elements with dynamic, interactive gameplay to create a memorable experience for young players. Mood Board To support my insights, I created a mood board inspired by my research to capture the overall visual style and tone. You can view the mood board here. Mood Board Strategy To define the problem, I created Point-of-View (POV) Statements for goal-oriented ideation and How-Might-We (HMW) Questions to guide brainstorming sessions. These were developed based on insights and needs identified in my preliminary research. How-Might-We The Design   The “Feed the Bear” game design creates a playful, vibrant atmosphere perfect for engaging young audiences. A warm, wood-textured aesthetic, combined with bright, cartoon-style illustrations, evokes a cozy, natural environment. The intuitive layout features clear buttons and easy navigation, ensuring a seamless user experience. Vibrant colors and earthy tones strike a balance between excitement and comfort. Thoughtfully designed screens, with concise instructions and intuitive icons, guide players through the game. The level selection screen, with star ratings and locked levels, motivates players to progress. Overall, the design offers a fun, energetic, and rewarding experience. Accordion Title Accordion Content Sketches After gathering enough information about what and who I’m designing for, I started sketching ideas for the logo and brand. This enables me to quickly explore and review my concepts before adding them into a digital program. Digital Roughs To get a better visualization of what the design could look like, I created digital variations of my sketches. Digital roughs are great for making quick changes of colors or components before finalizing the design. Icon Set The design embodies a fun and playful experience. The bright colors and round edges reinforce the game as friendly, playful, and humanistic. Interface & Applications A game for the children. The game UI follows on the colorful and playful style of the icons. Several screens were made for a better visualization of the game. Playful, Vibrant, Engaging. The Ultimate Bear Puzzle Challenge. Previous Project Dive into the creation of Feed the Bear, a puzzle game where you help a bear gather food for hibernation. Feed the Bear Next Project Explore the guidebook we crafted to help your clients easily navigate and engage with your business, ensuring a smooth and informed experience. Zatrox Informative Guidebook

Steam A User-Friendly Mobile Experience Steam, a top video game distribution platform, provides game installations, updates, and community features. However, its mobile app has held a low 2.6-star rating in the app store for the past eight years, reflecting a poor user experience and missed opportunities for increased engagement and sales. To tackle this, the team is redesigning the app to improve its design and boost user retention. Year: 2020 Project Type: Personal Project Produced: Independently Steam A User-Friendly Mobile Experience Steam, a top video game distribution platform, provides game installations, updates, and community features. However, its mobile app has held a low 2.6-star rating in the app store for the past eight years, reflecting a poor user experience and missed opportunities for increased engagement and sales. To tackle this, the team is redesigning the app to improve its design and boost user retention. Year: 2020 Project Type: Personal Project Produced: Independently Objective To refine the design of a feature-rich software client, ensuring it remains user-friendly and accessible to the average user. Approach The redesign will streamline the user flow with touch gestures, enhancing accessibility to key features. Research Plan Research allows me to deeply understand users—their frustrations, hopes, fears, and goals. It forms the foundation for creating effective solutions. To stay focused, I develop a research plan outlining goals, questions, assumptions, methods, participants, and timeline before beginning the research phase. Research Plan Accordion Title Accordion Content Research Goals Identify the target audience of Steam Learn about how the main competitors of Steam are catering to customers’ needs, as well as their strengths and weaknesses Get to know how people are managing their steam Uncover people’s experience of finding key features and games they want to play Assumptions Gamers are the main users of digital game distribution services Gamers are willing to use a mobile app to view content and make purchases Most people wait for discounts to make game purchases People are constantly looking for new games to play Steam (2018) Steam UI Gaming Habits Gamers 26-35 years old play for eight hours 12 minutes per week. This increased more than 25 percent in the last year. (Limelight Networks) Video gamers spend an average of 7.1 hours (seven hours, seven minutes) each week playing games. This is an increase of 19.3 percent in the last year. (Limelight Networks) Competitive Research It is equally important to research enterprises that pioneer in the market of platforms related to games, as their solutions to similar problems will help me gather insights about their strengths and weaknesses. These insights also help me identify any gaps in features that Steam might address. A complete competitive research can be viewed here. Provisional Persona With the data gathered from market research, I started to generate provisional personas using the statistical knowledge I gained to represent a certain type of user that is potential audience of Steam. These personas will help me screen appropriate people to interview. Market Research Understanding the market is crucial to identify what we know, who the audience is, and recent trends. Insights from market research guide the creation of personas and shape secondary research questions. A complete market research report can be viewed here. Market Research User Interview Building on initial market insights, I conducted in-depth interviews with 15 users about their Steam mobile experience, utilizing an Interview Guide containing 15 open-ended questions. Interview Guide Accordion Title Accordion Content Assumptions validated Gamers are the main users of digital game distribution services (Validated, 14/15) Gamers are willing to use the app to view content and make purchases (Validated, 13/15) Most people wait for discounts to make game purchases (Not Validated, 6/15) People are constantly looking for new games to play (Not Validated, 4/15) Empathy Map To synthesize the qualitative data gathered from user interview, I created an empathy map to identify patterns across users, uncover insights, and generate needs.          Insights Users have a hard time navigating through the current steam app Users get game recommendations from friends, streamers, and featured sales Users are more likely to make game purchases when they are on sale Users feel a sense of security when using the steam app for confirmations          Needs Users need a clean and simple design Users need an intuitive way to navigate through steam’s game collection Users need a way to find their favorite games on sale Users need to be able to access steam’s key mobile features such as steam guard User Persona After gathering knowledge of the audience, as well as their goals and needs, I use the user persona to represent key segments. It helps me focus on tackling the most important problems – to address the major needs of the most important user groups. It is both fictional and realistic. Let’s meet Ryan, a college student at Cal State Fullerton. He treats gaming as a way to take a break from school and work, and enjoys the memorable moments he has playing with his friends. How Might We… To define the problem I am going to solve, I create Point-of-View (POV) Statements that allow me to ideate in a goal-oriented manner, and How-Might-We (HMW) Questions to frame the ideation in the brainstorm session for solutions. The statements and questions are generated based on the insights and needs I gathered in my Empathy Map. Brainstorming Taking the HMW questions, I started my brainstorming process to come up with solutions for each of these problems. I decided to use mind mapping so that I could quickly generate as many ideas as I could. This is an extract of my brainstorm results. Product Goals With HMW questions and brainstormed solutions, I decided to list project goals that will both serve as a guide for the future development of the product and rubrics for determining what features to include in Steam’s mobile application. I summarized user goals from my user persona and empathy map, and established business goals based on the project brief. Accordion Title Accordion Content Application Map ‍After setting up the product goals and deciding what features