Ever wonder how games evolve and how all the decisions are made? During this three part series leading up to the relaunch of Jewel Trader, we will discuss what we did to make the game more attractive, more user-friendly and, in essence, more fun.
Three years ago I designed a game called Jewel Trader, for Flash. I based my design of the game on the buy low/sell high principals of DopeWars, but gave it a more ‘family-friendly’ feel by making ‘the goods’ precious stones instead of illegal substances. It was never released for one reason or another, but when Appsolute Media launched, I brought this game back for the iPhone.
Taking the original art from the Flash game, we ported this game to the iPhone. We made a few pretty neat ergonomic changes to aid in the buying and selling of the gems and released the game. When Jon Kobrin, my business partner, saw the game he asked me if the game was meant to have a retro feel because “the game art, sounds and feel are not iPhone.”
I have been designing games for limited platforms like set-top boxes for many years. And we always pushed the limits (as much as possible) in that platform. But this really got me thinking–What does it mean to make a well designed game for the iPhone?
My team and I took up the challenge, with strong creative guidance from our new Creative Director Edward Ludvigsen. Nothing was sacrosanct; we wanted to create a great gaming experience. Below I will show how we have morphed the Jewel Trader game from ‘retro-blah’ to what I believe is a really cool and winning product.
We started with the look of the main screen, the Jewel Trading Page, below. In the original version, the main screen was the same for all the cities. The only way to know what city you were in was to look at the icon in the upper right hand corner. (See that little Statue of Liberty for New York in the picture below).
Old Jewel Trader Main Trading Screen
In order to make the user want to go from city to city and discover new locations, we customized the look of each city so that people could really feel like they embarking on international travel (see below.) (I wonder how you would do this in DopeWars, to differentiate between buroughs). We wanted to capture the essence of each city so that the player would be drawn to a location not just by randomness but by the lure of the place.
Then New and Improved New York Main Trading Screen
New and Improved Los Angeles Trading Screen
New Moscow Main Trading Screen
We have created ten custom locations (above is an example of 3, but you will have to get the game to see the rest.) Notice how each city now has character and is interesting to travel to and discover. We have also moved the quantity that you hold of each gem under the gem price, and removed your average purchase price. The removal of the average purchase price is still being debated internally, and may or may not be present on the final release. Now, also, to help the user make smarter choices, we have colored profitable gem quantities appear in green and losing quantities in red.
The next step was to make the information on the top of the screen less drab (see original below), and to get rid of the silly New York picture that took up valuable screen space.
Original Notebook and Money Info
We thought about the information and decided to use the full screen real estate and create a nice notebook view. Now we can show 3 more fields and make it look visually appealing. So here it is now.
New and Improved Notebook View
In the original version, when you looked at the pager information, the image below the data got cut off. The gamer would have to slide their finger up to get the whole message and then left/right for more messages.
Original Pager
Now we utilize the entire top of the screen to really capture the information and make it super simple to navigate, just left and right. See how clean the image below is?
New and Improved Pager
We have also made the selling and buying screen more attractive and again utilized the entire screen real estate to make it easier for the user to see their transaction.
New and Improved Buy/Sell Notice
In the next few weeks I will discuss the customization of each city and introduction of new local characters, the addition of an in-depth tutorial to help users get to know all aspects of the game, the newly diverse sound effects, the fine-tuned top scores engine and all of the other aspects of the game that were revamped.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the Evolution of Jewel Trader.
