Portfolio Jay Fairouz

Hi, my name is Jay, I'm a 21-year-old student who's currently following the XR minor. I'm a 4th-year game development student that lives and studies in Amsterdam. I'm still deciding on what to do after I graduate, but I'm considering going for my master's degree.

In the future, I would like to work in an indie game studio and perhaps teach a couple of days a week.

During this semester I mainly want to focus on the design of an XR experience, especially on how users can and must behave in our XR environment.

Learning goals

What I want to learn

I mainly want to focus on the design of an XR experience, especially on how users can and must behave in our XR environment.

As a game designer, I want to make the designs of things that the user can interact with, in such a way that the user can determine what to do with barely any direct explanation.
As a developer, I want to improve my current coding knowledge, so I'm able to create even more complex mechanics.
As a game designer, I want to improve my knowledge about UX, so I can give the users an optimal experience.

What I learned

I made quite a lot of interaction designs during this semester, and I learned a lot from it. The biggest interactions that I designed were the way you walk in our experience, the shooting mechanic and the several voice input interactions. I learned new techniques to help me design such as brown boxing or starting out by making a mood board. And I learned how to filter through user feedback and implement what users actually want instead of what they say they want.
I improved my coding knowledge quite a bit, I made multiple new mechanics such as my own designed walking system and I researched and adapted a paint system that I fitted to our project. I made several fun interactions for the echo cave, such as the bead chains and the bubbles. I was involved in most of the voice input room to some degree. And I created the river of balls and elastics in the multibodyroom.
Sadly I didn't get to work on this learning goal as much as I would've liked to. UX has a lot to do with the small touches that make the experience better, but this project really struggled with scope creep so I didn't have a lot of time for that. The main UX improvements that I made were done right after playtests. If users were confused about how things worked, or if they appeared to be user-unfriendly, I changed them before our next playtest. For example we got the feedback that our echocave didn't feel caveish, gloomy and lonely enough. So I took it upon myself to redesign the color palette of the cave. Other UX improvements would for example be: Making the inhabiting more clear by letting users go through a portal instead of teleporting them when they possessed a body, making sure the HUB entrances were distinctive from each other and picking aesthetics that fit a mechanic such as the fire in the voice input room.

Conclusion

1 I think my learning goal succeeded quite well. Currently, we give no in-game explanation on how to walk, yet a lot of testers understood very quickly how to walk, while it was a unique walking system. I think most users picked it up that quickly because I designed it to be a natural walking motion so that the user would feel that they really inhabited the body they were in.

2. As mentioned before I created quite a few complex mechanics, that I'm happy to have worked on. I learned how to make my own VR walking mechanic in both SteamVR and OpenXR, I learned more about how to work with other people their code (for example with the paint mechanic) and I created a bunch of fun interactions for the player to engage with. And while I was improving my own coding knowledge I also helped out my team members by learning them a thing or two, which in return gave me more knowledge about the subject I was teaching.

3. There were a lot of minor things that I did that relate to UX, I'm happy that the testers were appreciative of most of these features. For example, most users felt like they really inhabited a body in each experience. That could only be pulled off by making each body with different mechanics somehow uniform, while they were also unique.

NextIntroduction Week

Last updated 3 years ago

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Learning goals

What I want to learn

I mainly want to focus on the design of an XR experience, especially on how users can and must behave in our XR environment.

As a game designer, I want to make the designs of things that the user can interact with, in such a way that the user can determine what to do with barely any direct explanation.

As a developer, I want to improve my current coding knowledge, so I'm able to create even more complex mechanics.

As a game designer, I want to improve my knowledge about UX, so I can give the users an optimal experience.

What I learned

I made quite a lot of interaction designs during this semester, and I learned a lot from it. The biggest interactions that I designed were the way you walk in our experience, the shooting mechanic and the several voice input interactions. I learned new techniques to help me design such as brown boxing or starting out by making a mood board. And I learned how to filter through user feedback and implement what users actually want instead of what they say they want.

I improved my coding knowledge quite a bit, I made multiple new mechanics such as my own designed walking system and I researched and adapted a paint system that I fitted to our project. I made several fun interactions for the echo cave, such as the bead chains and the bubbles. I was involved in most of the voice input room to some degree. And I created the river of balls and elastics in the multibodyroom.

Sadly I didn't get to work on this learning goal as much as I would've liked to. UX has a lot to do with the small touches that make the experience better, but this project really struggled with scope creep so I didn't have a lot of time for that. The main UX improvements that I made were done right after playtests. If users were confused about how things worked, or if they appeared to be user-unfriendly, I changed them before our next playtest. For example we got the feedback that our echocave didn't feel caveish, gloomy and lonely enough. So I took it upon myself to redesign the color palette of the cave. Other UX improvements would for example be: Making the inhabiting more clear by letting users go through a portal instead of teleporting them when they possessed a body, making sure the HUB entrances were distinctive from each other and picking aesthetics that fit a mechanic such as the fire in the voice input room.

Conclusion