Categories
Interaction Design UX Design Virtual Reality

Free persona template (and examples)

Personas are an important and incredibly useful interaction design tool. (And I love making them.) While preparing my new Interaction Design class, I was looking for a persona template for my students to use. I couldn’t find many free templates that don’t require you to sign up for something. So I made one. I’m posting the template here for anyone to download and use for free. It’s available as AI, SVG, and PDF.

You’ll need a vector graphics editor to modify these. If you are looking for a free one, try Inkscape. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Download

License

I am licensing these template designs under a CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication, which means you can use and modify these templates for any purpose without asking permission or giving me attribution. The Raleway typeface has its own license.

Persona Examples

Here are three personas I created for a VR game I am working on.

Categories
108 Koans Art

108 Koans Retrospective – Koans 20–29

This week: Koans 20–29, in which I run down the street, kiss a cactus, and get philosophical about candy.

View the Koans at derekds.com/108

Categories
Game Design Virtual Reality

Virtual reality maze

Last month I wrote about how I’m working on Udacity’s Virtual Reality Developer nanodegree. My most recent project is a virtual reality maze that you can navigate to find and collect seven coins and a key.

 

Top-down view of the maze.
Top-down view of the maze.
A hand-drawn sketch of the maze.
Initial sketch.

Once you have collected the key, you can unlock the door to the temple, winning the game. The project required the use of C# scripting to track the state of the key and door, and to create the effect of collecting objects (animation, sound, and destroying & creating objects).

A 3D rendered coin.
A coin. Don’t you just wanna compulsively collect these?
Stereoscopic view of a 3D rendered pedestal with a key on top of it.
Spoiler alert: The key is on top of a pedestal behind the temple.

Udacity provided the starter project files, which included prefab maze walls, temple, coins, key, etc. I had to design the maze and place the walls, coins, and key in the scene to make a playable game. I also wrote scripts to create the interactions in the game, such as the sound effects and animation upon collecting coins, tracking whether or not the key has been collected, and animating the door opening. You can read all the requirements on the project rubric.

Workin’ in Unity.
More wireframes.

Gameplay video

Planned improvements

At some point I plan to come back to this project to make improvements, such as

  • Create a UI to track and display the number of coins collected.
  • Make the key collectable only after finding all seven coins.
  • Create “floating” animation for coins and key.
  • Make sound effect for trying to open the door without a key.
  • Tweak the placement of the waypoints.
  • Improve placement and symmetry of objects.
  • Add more objects of interest to the maze.

 

Categories
108 Koans Art

108 Koans Retrospective – Koans 10–19

This week: Koans 10–19, in which things glitch, break, and get thrown away.

View the Koans at derekds.com/108

Categories
Game Design

‘Teaching Game Design’ panel @ PixelPop

I’ll be moderating a panel on Teaching Game Design this weekend at the PixelPop Festival.  The panel is Sunday 8/6 at 10:00am. Come check it out if you are in St. Louis!

Panel description:

“Have you ever thought about teaching a game design class? What and how would you want to teach the next generation of game makers? Many of us in the game design industry are self-taught, but what place does game design have in higher education? Join four designers who have taught game design courses at local universities as we discuss some of the unique challenges and joys of teaching game design, and things we’ve learned from the process. If you’ve been considered teaching on the side, this is a great chance to learn more about it.”

Panelists:

Categories
108 Koans Art

108 Koans Retrospective – Koans 1–9

It’s the first batch of commentaries!

View the Koans at derekds.com/108