Jewel Jam is a Topgolf AR game that I worked on 2018, my role in this project is to design the user interfaces, experience of the game. I provide the team with clear vision of what we are building by creating prototypes of the main flow and interactions. Basically, Jewel Jam is a Match 3 game that plays with golf, here's a quick tutorial that explains how it works:
This is also the actual tutorial sequence that the user sees when they first play the game
The main challenge of this project is how do we explain to the user that they have to first look at the screen first, plan where to hit their ball in order to create a color match and look at the screen again after their shot to see what happen on the game board.
This is a prototype of how a match will work, I also designed the score feedback animation when you get a match:
Other than the usual match 3 mechanics, the games also comes with special balls and bonus targets:
Row Blaster mockup
Row/Column Blaster
This special ball will take out the entire row or column of the spot where your ball landed.
This special ball will take out the entire row or column of the spot where your ball landed.
Super Target mockup
Super Target
Super target give extra bonus point when you match surrounding jewels
Mock up of when you have a series of matches and demonstrates how the scores add up
Jewel color change FX
Jewel match FX
To ensure the next player understand what to do to start their turn, I designed a simple animation on top of the turn summary to convey the message:
Player change sequence
End game sequence
After months of hard work and dedication of the team, here is a video of the end product experience by a real player at Topgolf. The game turns out great and the player clearly understands how it works. As you can see from the video, the player hits the ball and immediately looks back at the screen and see how he scores: