Prototyping Approaches

Since we start to feel content with our gathered knowledge, it's time to start thinking about how we can prototype and evaluate our ideas and hypotheses regarding engrossing/immersive UI solutions.

Since neither of us have massive coding skills, one reasonable option is to look for games where UI elements can be disabled (for example runner vision in ME, the guiding arrow in Bioshock, hardcore mode in CoD, etc), and do user tests with the UI elements of interest turned on and off, and observe any differences in player engrossment. The obvious advantage of this is that we don't have to spend any effort prototyping our own UI solutions, however this will also limit us to only test others ideas and also not be completely free to choose the ideas that we are interested in testing (since enabling/disabling UI elements is a rare option in games).

Another option that we have carried with us since the start of the project is to prototype ideas by superimposing information on top of pre-recorded gameplay footage. Here, at least in my opinion, the advantages does not make up for the disadvantages; the prototypes will not be interactive which will most certainly affect users opinions, and we will be limited to overlay information (the only reasonable approach to prototyping spatial info this way is to pause the movie and put the element into the game space).

I found a potentially interesting tool to develop our own prototypes; FPS Creator. As the name implies, this is an application for developing FPS games without writing any code at all (in extreme cases at least). The HUD is fully customizable, overlay filter effects is used to indicate health and hopefully this is fully customizable as well it. If the application allows some fairly straight-forward scripting I think this might be really suitable for us when testing ideas.