DESIGNER
UXR
SAN FRANCISCO BASED

5:38 AM

SIDE PROJECT

Bargain Bandits

ROLE

Art Direction

Game Design

Brand Design

UI Design

TEAM

Andrew Hung (Art Production)

Brandon Chang (Dev, Game Design)

Caitlin Pequignot (Music Production)

TIMELINE

3 days in early 2024

SUMMARY

The Bargain Bandit is on the loose! Bargain Bandit is a mini-game I designed along with my brother and a few friends.

CONTEXT

Bargain Bandits is a web-based game created using Gadot. It was our submission to a 3 day game jam, where it won first place. We mixed photoshop illustrations with vector elements from Figma, and ran everything through a pixel filter to create a cohesive style. It's a self contained game you can play on any computer with a play session time of a few minutes.

Play the game

A game about legal criminals

Brainstorming ideas

The theme of the game jam was "legal criminals". We brainstormed examples together for roughly an hour. Some of the examples were a little too depressing (patent trolling, anyone?,) but we managed to come up with a few quirky ideas. Some of my favorites: speeding when you think highway patrol isn't around, managing a cult , and getting away with loud cellphone conversations.

We landed on a quintessential 90's idea that we fell in love with—A grandma with a gigantic coupon book in the check-out line at the local grocery store, trying to maximize her discount.

Game mechanics and UI concepting

We began by white boarding game mechanics so our engineer could get started. The core mechanic is to stack coupons to get more discounts. We worked backwards from there to figure out the game logic. I rapidly diagrammed and prototyped the basic mechanics and interactions as we discussed, so we could get a feel for gameplay.

We wanted to get from concept to a working prototype in code as fast as possible so we could start play-testing the game. I worked alongside our artist to increase fidelity of visual assets and our engineer would share new builds every few hours.

Art Direction, UI, & Visual Treatments

We wanted an early 90's inspired visual theme that was drawn in our artist's natural style so he could produce assets quickly. I started by designing the coupons and we extrapolated how other assets looked to match the coupon vibes. I worked closely with our artist to combine UI and illustrative elements.

Testing & Simplifying

When we play tested it, we realized it wasn't that fun—it felt overly complicated and the pacing off. We had too many variables in the game—there were static coupons ($5 off), Multipliers (2x), BOGO, and tiered coupons (if you have x number of the same type of item, you get a larger discount).

You could stack tiered coupons by item type (produce, technology, drinks), and items with expiration dates received a larger discount. If you played your coupons right, you could overshoot the price of the item and actually get money back. All realistic mechanics and great in theory, but way too many things to consider for a mini-game.

We stripped it down to just static coupons and multipliers, we updated the win criteria to getting as close to free as you can without going over the item's price. The tension and difficulty of the game shifted to beating the clock with simple math, and managing your coupon "hand".

Launch & Reception

We placed 1st place in the game jam, out of 36 entries. Many users noted the polish, pacing, and fun of the game. The only area we placed second in was on visuals and sound—that just comes down to how difficult is to hand-illustrate so many assets in such a short time. In the future, we'll try to integrate generative AI to produce assets faster while still letting our artist drive the direction.

Reflections

Game design is next level

Game design is a whole new level of design that's a step beyond what I've done with software design. There are so many variables to making a great experience. I'm enamored with the process and have gained so much respect for game developers.

You need to prototype a game

In terms of how this relates back to my software design practice, it's furthered my conviction that designers really need to build what they design—or prototype well enough to effectively simulate experiences. I want to work towards evolving into the kind of designer that can build a game and test it without requiring technical partners.

Generative AI is great for concepting

Generative AI is great for concepting and communicating with production artists. There were multiple instances where I used Midjourney to generate assets and show our artist the kind of vibe and direction I was looking for. I also want to explore using Generative AI to help artists create game assets faster.

Play the game