For my text preview, I will be discussing the design elements I hope to include in my game, CANDYLAND: the board game adventure brought to virtual life with a deadly twist.

CANDYLAND brings in all the fun candy-themed characters and places from the game with a new story attached. The main character is travels there from the “real” world and gets caught up in an assassination plot. Somebody is out to kill the Kandy King, and it’s up to your character to get down to the bottom of it. But It’s up to you whether your character gets to be a villain or a hero.

This game is supposed to involve a sense of solving a mystery. The player can find out information (“clues”) on who-dun-it by exploring the various commands offered during each round of game play, most likely from talking to the inhabitants of CANDYLAND. Since each candy person is a suspect, it is important that they be memorable to the player, and so pictures that show what they look like would be beneficial to the fulfilling the purpose of the game and must be included. It would be cool if I was able to make an icon for each character to display next to that characters dialogue and to show that the player has met that character. If the character hasn’t met a character, there will be a grey icon with a question mark inside it to show the player its still missing characters.

Along with pictures of the places visited by the player. The charm of CANDYLAND is the creepy nostalgia it gives you by putting you face-to-face with your childhood memories. I was heavily inspired by The Uncle Who Worked at Nintendo, the game we played in glass that really captured this feeling. I want the pictures to resemble a darker side of this joy-filled, sugar-coated land. If I had the time and the skill, I could even do my own digital art.

Lastly, there must be images of the items you collect. This way, the player will be able to remember that they have collected them. Obtaining certain items will lead to the ability to access new commands needed to move on with the story, and so it’s vital for the player to know what items they have and haven’t collected. As with the character icons, it would be cool if I could make item icons that could be used to keep track of what has been collected and what hasn’t.

Overall, these visual design elements will help the player reach the purpose of this game–to use the information and items they learn on their journey to solve the mystery behind the King Kandy assassination plot.