Dairy Life Game Concept
Dairy Life was an extension project of MOO. For this project I concepted a mobile video game where you are a dairy farmer. The game would be similar in style to Farmville, it would be a farm simulation game. Unlike Farmville, this game would only focus only on dairy farm production and would, in an entertaining way, teach you about the dairy industry and what it takes to be a dairy farmer.
Main Game layout
Game UX/UI Design
In this game, just like similar games to it, you level your way up to make a better farm. Although, I wanted this game to have some different features to it that would make the game more interesting, and ultimately make it stand out from the others like it.
Milk Market
First new feature is the Milk Market. My dad is a farmer (not a dairy farmer) and he talked about the market a lot when selling his crops. Obviously our world runs on supply and demand and the price of goods depends on the overall market of things, so I wanted this game to have a similar function: A.K.A. the Milk Market. So when you would sell off the milk from your cows you could check the milk market to see if it was a good time to sell, if the graph is green then you would make more money. If red, then you would make less. Also I wanted you to be able to control how much milk you wanted to sell incase you wanted to hold to see if the graph would go higher and make even more money.
Herd Health
Now in this game I wanted it to feel like you really owned the animals on your farm. That’s why I added the Herd Health. The Herd Health would be the place where you could easily just look over your barns and feed or take care of your cattle. In the real world you would have to feed your animals and if they got sick you would have to take care of them. I chose to design a simple pie graph for the heard health because I thought it would be an easy visual way to see how your herd was doing: are they healthy, hungry, or sick? Also on the side I added a small little side bar so you could see how every barn is doing and if you clicked on it, then it would show the pie graph for that barn.
Milk Bins
Now this feature of the game isn’t that realistic to real life but the purpose of the milk bins is. I wanted a feature to the game that basically added an expiration date to the milk that you make. So, I created this section which is the Milk Bins. The milk bins are where you store all the milk that your cows produce, but over time the milk will expire and you have to get rid of the expired milk. I think this feature adds the most difficulty to the game because it makes your main source of income (your milk) fluctuate. You may have a lot of cows that make a lot of milk, but if you can’t store or get rid of the milk in time then you lose money. I didn’t want this function of the game to be too punishing for casual players but I did want something that would keep you checking on the game.
The Shop
Obviously the shop is not a crazy new idea but I do think it is an important feature to the game that I wanted to show. Obviously the shop is where you go to buy the items in the game that will help you be successful. I wanted the design to be simple and straight forward. You can scroll through different sections in the shop to find what you need.
3D Building models
I made the buildings in the 3D modeling software Blender. I figured modeling these buildings would be the fastest way to make them. I wanted their designs to be basic so, from a zoomed out perspective, you could easily read what building they are. I used an NPR (non-photorealistic) shading style when rendering so that it would have an illustrated look. This way the building would cohesively fit with the style of the game.
BOB
Bob is the main N.P.C. (non-playable character) for Dairy Life. His main role for the game is to be your “teacher”, that runs you through the tutorial and teaches you how to play. Bob as a character is an old dairy farmer who knows the business like the back of his hand, ultimately making him the best person to teach you how to get the job done.
Main Poses
