Viscera
Viscera is an ongoing project, more informations soon...
Project Overview
Viscera is a first person hack and slash arena fighter game, in which you use a powerful rapier to slain your enemies in melee... or do you ? The main idea of this project is to be appealing to hardcore FPS gamers by being fast-paced and challenging, but the twist we want to push is to try to question the habits of these gamers by proposing a non-violent way of dealing with the enemies, by linking them together.
The vertical slice of Viscera is currently being developped and we have until the end of february to ship it. It will be the result of 6 months of work.
On this project, I work as a UX Researcher and UX Designer.
Concept artworks by Morgane Bru and Mahé Letellier
My Work
Target Audience Definition
As a User Researcher, I was tasked to determine who our audience might be. We determined with the team games with an experience close to the one we want to create with Viscera and I reviewed hundreds of steam reviews to thouroughly understand what players did or did not like in these games. I used this massive amount of data and classified it methodically, until I came up with the profile above.
Our audience ranges from mid to hardcore. This comes from the fact that Viscera is a fast paced fps game in a 3D space, requiering from the player to have a certain mastery of controls in a complex virtual environment.
We identified 3 main motivators that matches our audience expectations regarding the game, taken from Quantic Foundry's motivational model :
Our audience is looking for a challenging and intense experience, both technically and in terms of difficulty. They would expect something that makes them feel intense emotions.
On the opposite, our players are usually hyperfocused into the game and want few sensory distractions and hindrances inherent to gameplay : they want to go fast, aim fast, and kill in a satisfying way. They also dislike unfair difficulty balance or spikes.
Accessibility
I used the Game Accessibility Guidelines as a support to help me conceptualise the accessibility features we want for our game, while adapting them for our needs.
Here are the main accessibility features we're focusing on :
- Fully remappable and customizable controls with both mouse/keyboard and controller
- A highly customizable camera to deal with motion sickness being a high risk in a FPS hack and slash game
- A high contrast mode, allowing people with visual impariments to have a clear understanding of the action and important elements on screen.
- Customizable sound busses separating the ambient sounds, the sound effects and the music. We will also have a mono mode allowing people with hearing impairment to have all the stereo informations
- A functional options menu allowing players to tweak all the parameters in the menu I will talk about in the section below.
Make sure to check out all the accessibility features we have planned and priorized in this document :
High contrast mode mockup
