For my senior capstone, I wanted to design something that I wholeheartedly wanted to exist in the world. Something that, if it were to become reality, would be something I could look at and use on a daily basis. Something I’m passionate about, and enjoy spending my time on. And so of course I turned to good ol’ tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, and the many obstacles that come with playing them. After some deliberation I ultimately ended up choosing to target a phase of the game that I find myself grappling with on a daily basis: creating campaigns themselves.
For those of you who aren’t as knowledgeable on the topic, tabletop roleplaying games (which I’ll refer to as TRPGs from now on) are quite an involved and time-consuming pastime. Typical play presents itself in the form of campaigns (long-running stories) that are made up of any number of sessions (single-sitting meetings) that can run for many an hour. Players have their own player characters that compose the campaign’s party, and interact with a vast and complex world presented by the Dungeon Master (DM for short).
Now, to better describe how a Dungeon Master’s job works, let me present to you a metaphor. Imagine that a campaign is a TV series, and that each session is a single episode. In that regard, the player characters would be the protagonists of the series, yes? But then, who takes charge of everything else? The DM! A DM has to take into consideration the entire world within which the campaign takes place, the overarching plot, the forces in the world that would affect the party, and all the other non-player characters in the entire world. Going back to our TV metaphor, that’s like if the director was in charge of creating, moving around, and placing all the set pieces, and playing all the characters that aren’t main characters- all at once! And the final kicker is that the DM has no control over what the player characters decide to do, so they need to be ready for whatever crazy antics the group may choose to pursue.
Seeing how difficult and time-consuming being a DM is, it’s easy to understand how a lot of people would choose to forgo the DM seat and just pursue their hobby purely as a player. However, what about the people who do wish to run games? Sometimes a group of friends wants to play but no one is willing to be the DM, and D&D time is what they use to socialize. On top of that, with great responsibility comes great power, and any world a person can imagine can become reality given the time and resources to build.
This is where FAMILIAR comes in to save the day. As a robust writing/story planning application accessible from both desktop and phone applications, it assists creators in getting inspiration and keeping their notes organized.
In terms of research materials, I had more than enough resources to dig into. Not only am I myself a DM, but many of my closest friends are and were more than happy to contribute to my efforts.
Utilizing the one-on-one conversations I had with them as well as some survey data, I put together two personas. One is an individual who has played TRPGs as a player before, but never as a DM, and the other is one who is highly experienced as a Dungeon Master and therefore overall as a player as well. Both come with their own unique needs and challenges, as you can see in the given details.
I also created an as-is map and a to-be map, the latter of which conveniently overlays the former to display the touch points which FAMILIAR addresses (or would address when built up to its full potential)
Here are some of my initial attempts at realizing my vision for FAMILIAR. You can see that it’s much more clunky and cluttered than the final proof, but many of the original ideas ended up consistently visible all the way to the end.
I visualized my initial concepts through hand sketches as well as through initial mock-ups made in Illustrator and Adobe XD.
The star of the show for this capstone project is FAMILIAR’s desktop interface, which illustrates the functionality and features of the program as most likely to be accessed in an actual use-case scenario… at least, according to what I found out via discussing with my interviewees.
The final project was made using Adobe Illustrator for making individual screens and XD for animations, for both the desktop and phone applications.
While primary access for FAMILIAR would be the desktop application, being able to quickly look up notes and resources on a phone app was also deemed highly useful for DMs. The phone application would have editing capabilities, but would mostly be reserved for quick direct reference to content on another screen.
I also added a small feature that would be useful for more vocal-based DMs in the Recording feature. Akin to that of Siri or other CUI transcribing spoken word into text, FAMILIAR would be able to take in verbal input from the user’s microphone and either place it in a new card, or add it to one already created. This feature can be accessed at all times by selecting the microphone icon in the top menu bar.
Finally, here is my final page describing some details regarding my branding. I wanted to try a combination of two palettes with only one or two unifying colors, which I believe worked out rather well.
Overall I had a good time working on this project. Though the time constraints and schedule confusion were quite a detriment in the end, it was incredibly satisfying to work on a project on my own, focusing on a topic I enjoy. I hope that I will have a chance to work on similar self-propelled projects in the future too, whether by my own initiative or otherwise.