Who Painted It?

Ever wonder about artists' life stories and personalities?

As learning art history can be a tedious journey, we want to add some fun into this process of getting a taste of artists' inspirations and life stories.

We designed Who Painted It? to teach art knowledge. As art students and enthusiasts, we have been saddened by many peers who think art is “pointless” or just too “up-there.” Many of them just assume they cannot “get” art, perhaps due to art history classes that drill the names of all the -isms before getting to the soul and spirit behind each brushstroke of masterpieces. Before ideating on possible game forms, we reached a consensus to make a game that makes art feel more intimate and fun to players.

MY ROLES

Game Design

Visual Design

Playtesting

TEAM

Na He Jeon

Dennis Jeong

DURATION

Oct 2018 - Dec 2018

FINAL DESIGN

Art Card

I designed three categories of art cards for players to collect, based on three art movements, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Surrealism.
In the Word Bank, the three art movements are indicated by different color schemes. I applied the same color schemes to the art cards, so that players can associate color with corresponding art movements.

Word Bank

We selected four artists for each art movement (Impressionism, Post-impressionism and Surrealism), and curated three paintings for each artist . The player just has to choose from these artists to guess the right artist for each card. This solves the problem of each card being too cluttered with both the painting and the choice of possible artist names. We tested players’ knowledge about the paintings after they finished playing the game.
Players were able to remember a fair amount of information, though we cannot guarantee the learning outcome of the game for long-term memory.

Goal Card

Based on goal cards, players can choose to collect paintings from a specific artist, collect paintings from different artists, or collect paintings from an art movement. They accumulate art cards to reach goal cards’ requirements, then they gain reputation points to eventually win the game.

Game Board

To ensure a cohesive visual style across different parts of the game, I created a list of color schemes, fonts, sizes and measurements as well as visual assets.
My teammate Na He designed the Monopoly-style art board that shows a series of cities.

PLAYTEST

Design Changes

After playtesting the game with users, we made the following changes to fix usability issues, improve learning outcomes and learner engagement:
1. We made the cards 28% bigger and also rotated the images to match their aspect ratio, since people were having trouble reading both the text and the cards.
2. We made it so that instead of rolling one die to see how much you would move, you could roll two and choose which one you wanted to use, since people felt like their movement around the board was completely random.
3. We added some goal cards that interacted with the locations on the boards. This was a bandaid on the fact that we didn’t have time to change the board itself to make the locations more interesting in the context of the game.