Our senior capstone team was selected to attend the Game Developers Conference 2026 in San Francisco where we showcased our unique game controller alongside teams from other schools as well as teams from independent game studios from across the country
Beat the Clock to Save Your Monster!
In this exciting, cooperative exhibit you and your friends bring a monster of your very own to life! In this time-based challenge, you and your teammate are the masterminds of a turbulent operation to bring your own monster to life. Move quickly to wire up your machines, complete fun, high stakes tasks around the lab, and work together to create the most ferocious monster of them all!
Core Interaction
Players connect a cable from a central heart podium to the appropriate station to be able to complete a task. As time continues and difficulty increases, players will have to chain multiple tasks together to complete in succession
MY ROLE
As one of the team's UX/UI designers, I worked the central task screen interface design connecting our custom physical controller to the on-screen game experience in the form of tasks that needed to be completed
Because players were interacting through an unconventional input method, the interface needed to clearly communicate various game states and feedback in ways a standard controller game wouldn't require
Style Considerations
Seeing that this project was going to be seen by a very wide range of ages, consideration of how the game experience would look played a largely crucial role.
Our goal was to create something that fits the frankenstein's monster theme but didn't branch over in the horror realm
Task Screen UI Assets
As one of the UX/UI designers, I focused on creating the assets that would be used in the game experience that fit the style that we had developed and fleshed out that also communicate what it was that needed to be done from the gameplay standpoint. The pink color in our UI was used to indicate any in game tasks that were ready to be completed
Individual Tasks
Chained Tasks
Physical Installation
The unique piece of this project, was the fact that there is a combination digital elements as well as physical ones that interact with one another. This forced our team to think in the real world and think about factors such as user accessibility, communication of the interactions, and how to utilize the space we were given to exhibit
What I learned
This project was my final senior capstone project for my New Media Design degree. This project was much different from my other school and personal projects as I had a team of 6 designers and 6 developers to work alongside with which really taught me the flow and coordination needed to work with others and outline schedules and deadlines for everything to come together.
This project also taught me a lot about project scope as it was important throughout developing this experience, to approach the design with an idea of what was possible for our developers to achieve in the semester we had to make this project happen