Purble Place Re-Design & Guidelines
Timeline: 3 weeks, November - December 2025. notes: Team work / UX.UI / HCI / Game Design / Illustration / Mockup Tools: Figma.
Team:Salena Karwa, Kylie Wawryk, Cathy Lun, Quorianka Huarcaya.
A dive back into the early Windows-era PC installed game created in 2009, Purble Place, composed of 3 mini games consisting of cake baking, character creation pattern matching, and a card flipping memory game.
A nostalgic childhood game for many targeted for young children as the main players as well as teens and early adults that want that nostalgic feeling of childhood.
Through user testing of the 3 game plays, multiple issues arise and solutions were created to design 3 part loop (challenge, reward, feedback), ensuring accessibility, and low friction entry barrier.
1. User testing on separate gameplays to determine pain points.
2. Determining how intelligence (age) comes in play with children as users.
3. Compiling ideation documentation into a design guideline for our solution.
4. Determine target users, philosophy of game, and fun of gameplay.
5. Physical mock game-play simulation experience without guidance.
6. Universal accessibility regardless educational experience.
Pain Points
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No instructions or demos for game play.
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Difficulty level is static, manually changed.
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Lacks adaptive feedback.
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Challenging to target players (children).
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One and done game, no enticement for continuous play. Low retention rate.
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No social interactions.
Target Users: Children aged 8 -14.
Nostalgic Players aged 15 - 25.
Step-by-step gameplay sketch.
Game Mechanism Inclusion ---------
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Normans principles:
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visibility
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constraints
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feedback
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Low-fidelity hardware
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Smart Seeing and Projection
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Reward system
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Engaging and scalable loops
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Long term motivation and structure
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Create a social gaming enviroment
Physical Prototype for Game-Play.
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Through 2 cycles of game-play user testing for feedback. First cycle to test whether player is able to understand and finish game-play without creators guidance based on visual cues and existing context. Second cycle explains proper usage and considerations behind design.
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Success criteria based on how efficiently and comfortable users feel as they play through physical prototype by themselves.
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Aesthetic importance of providing coziness to player.
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Inclusion of first time user onboarding for minimal friction entry.
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Revealing of machinery tools one at a time to prevent information overload.
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Utilizing distinct shapes to allow universal accessibility regardless of visual disabilities such as colour blindness.
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Including learning aspect to allow children use game-play as educational experience. May be used by parents or teachers.
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Ensuring 3 part loop on challenge, reward, and feedback integrated to encourage continuous game-play and fun. In this case: challenge (bake cake and layering), reward (coins to upgrade or shop items), feedback (how they did and improvements).
Photography of User-Testing Game Play.
Design Guidelines.
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Uses evidence based design with citations for further clarification on individual elemental re-design choices.
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Overview on concepts utilized in this project, process of prototyping from sketches, physical prototypes, to details on each step-by-step process description on how to play.
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Inclusion on engagement and core loop to continue user curiosity.
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Iteration through old player user testing and first time user testing.
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Exploration on edge cases and potential exploitation of systems.
Proposed Improvements:
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Implement first time user feedback directly into re-design and rebuild actual game on PC.
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Consider additional aspects on other mini games such as memory card matching and adding more games.
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Clearer and detailed social integration aspect into game interface itself and challenges that may be issued for potential multi-player games.
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Having actual target user range test play the re-design to find loopholes and additional issues that may be cause from the re-design or areas on improvement.