Niantic shows off early designs for Pokemon GO, including original design for trainer avatar
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 2 Comments
During a session at GDC this week, Niantic’s Dennis Hwang provided a look at how Pokemon GO changed throughout development. The company messed around with different versions of the overworld map, a variety of takes on the appearance of the battle screen, and even original plans for the trainer avatar.
As for the trainer, originally Niantic had an avatar more in line with the character from Pokemon Ruby / Sapphire. However, it was scrapped during early stages of development.
Hwang said during his talk:
“[In] the original IP, the trainers have a much younger look as the target audience tends to skew younger. But for us, the avatars, we wanted to kind of elevate them to an older generation slightly.”
“We didn’t want some super stylized big-headed, small-bodied characters running on the map when you’re the real game hero. We kind of wanted to match the virtual with the physical.”
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Niantic would like the game to be a social network, looking to include “more heads-up play”
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 3 Comments
The Verge recently spoke with Niantic’s Dennis Hwang, who was previously in charge of designing Google Doodles. Much of the conversation revolved around Pokemon GO.
At one point, Hwang was asked if he considers the game to be a social network. His response was as follows:
“I think we would like for it to be. That’s kind of part of the way we envision our platform, is really bringing people together. It’s not really about the specific game title or mobile phone app, it’s how do you create a shared experience that brings people together. So for Ingress, when we did start seeing boyfriend / girlfriend, husband / wife, people who are having kids after meeting each other playing our game, it was super satisfying and we were overjoyed to see that actually happening.
We’re sort of trying to paint an optimistic future, where technology is really bringing people together, not like you’re strapping a screen in a dark place to your face, where every interaction becomes through a camera, through a computer, through a network — that seems a little too dystopian to us. So we’re trying to see if there’s a better way to do things.”
Hwang later took on a question about Pokemon GO’s design and whether he’d change anything. This prompted him to speak about wanting to incorporate “more heads-up play.” Niantic wants players looking less at their phones rather than more.
Hwang said:
“Oh, there’s a lot that isn’t perfect. We had a pretty tight timeline to build this. I think just generally speaking the biggest element we’re looking to improve is allowing more heads-up play. It saddens me a little bit when I see a lot of hunched over people outside. They’re having fun, they’re outside in a great public park, but we’re always wanting a little more direct engagement with our immediate surroundings. So those are design choices we’re looking at carefully to keep improving it.
Like let’s say in the current interface, some of the information about a pokémon that spawned is in fine detail and the icon is really small. It’s going to make you go closer to the screen. We may just iterate on the design until you feel like the information is being presented to you in a way where you’re not having to stick your nose on the screen. It could be a simple size change, or the way the notification is animated, or it could be auditory cues instead of visual cues. There are a lot of options we’re going to explore.”
