NomHunters | Mobile Game App Design

NomHunters is a self-starter project with a couple of developer friends where I was the sole designer. We are building a gamified version of restaurant search app for foodies. Imagine Pokemon Go but rather than augmented reality interactions when you arrive at a location, you get to experience different types of cuisines instead as you search for Prince Nom of a fictional world we created for the game.

Our purpose is to encourage daily exploration of your own city and community. This is why we want to create a whole new world for food, where it is a mission of discovery, a cultural story, an appreciation of skill, and an educational amusement; whilst connecting food lovers with culinary creators. 

After building a brand strategy together, I designed a curiously comical, fun and all-inviting visual style to match our lore. This was then used to build a components library for our app.

See: https://dribbble.com/shots/18469474-NomHunters-Branding-Components-Library

As me and my friends wanted to use this project to learn new skills, we pushed ourselves to create things we hadn't before. Through this project, I learnt a lot of features of Figma and also had to bear in mind the skills of our developers as I was designing this app, its features, functions and visuals.

I hope you enjoy reading about this project! Here are some key parts I will be presenting:

1. The lore of our game

2. Splash pages and account creation

3. Finding food

4. A food journal

5. Player missions

6. Leaderboards

7. Avatar customisation, in game currency, and shop

8. Quiz game

-----

But first, here's the lore we wrote as a foundation for our app:

In a magical land called The Land of Unem, food used to be widespread across the land, until one day, something happened which led to the Unem King banning all types of cooking and foods. There was a protest but everyone got jailed under the dictatorship of the King.

Many generations later, Unems sustain themselves through magic alone, and history books are changed to cover up the truth of the land. The successor to the throne, Prince Nom, finds a secret cellar in the castle which has an old journal and a portal to our world. The journal describes that our world contains many delicious foods that have long been forgotten in Unem as well as many subsequent new ones. Curious, Prince Nom uses the portal and escapes to our world after leaving a letter to his parents.....

The King and Queen are devastated, they summon an army of hunters to search for Prince Nom. Stunned by their son’s resolve and understanding their ignorance, they order the Hunters to educate themselves in a bid to bring the culinary world back to Unem. For the King truly wished to make the Land of Unem a place his son would call home.

And so Nomhunters have entered our world.

Every month, royal spies create a list of rumoured places where he is hiding, but because he is under a disguise, it is unknown exactly where he is. At the end of each month, Prince Nom would remove his disguise before moving on to another place, at which point, it will become known what culinary experiences he has discovered.

Users will take the Nomhunter that they have befriended (ie. the app mascot) to as many locations as possible and teach them about the food at that location for them to report back to the King of Unem, who will rank his Nomhunters based on the insights they report back.

And meet the characters of this world:

Meet Prince Nom, King Scoff, Chief Tuck, Prince Nosh and Queen Sup with an army of NomHunters!

Entering world + citizenship application

Hunting for food and Prince Nom

We had many discussions on whether our app was a tool or a game. Something that was certain was that this section of our app was a core part in delivering our mission, and searching for food was indeed a tool. But that didn't mean we couldn't also use gamification to make it more fun! In order to gamify food hunting, we wanted to place food locations on a map with user avatars of the highest scoring user at each location and food badges representing the type of cuisine the user would be eating and collecting into their food journal.

A problem we encountered after dev had built it was that it became too clustered when the map was zoomed out further so I got back to the drawing board and redesigned how the map would look as the user zoomed out much further and also designed a cleaner layout with the format of the cards. Here's v1 (and our old branding) compared to the improved version.

Logbook to report to King Scoff

Gamification 1: Collecting badges of food you eat

From some target user interviews did with foodies, we found that quite a number of people liked to have a way of seeing what food they had eaten so our main focus of gamifying food hunting was having badges to represent different cuisines that they could add to a journal to see how much they have eaten and how much they have yet to eat.

NomHunter missions from Chief Tuck

Gamification 2: Player progression and quests

As with any game, missions are a key part, but the challenge for the design was to present all the intricate layers in a comprehensible format. I focused on consistency to make it look less busy, ease of browsing using tabs and icons, and highlights on progression using colours and components.

Rankings of all NomHunters

Gamification 3: Leaderboards

After some research into gamification, we understood the importance of a leaderboard. After all, without any means to show off your progress, rewards are much less attractive.

We also know how much player love to see stats of their progress and achievements so we also included a page for personal analysis.

Buying things for + dressing up your NomHunter

Gamification 4: Shop, in-game currency and avatar customisation

If players are going to show off their achievements to the world, they must do it in style! Players can personalist their NomHunter with rewards and rare items they buy or find to become the envy of others. We are currently still working on our characters and items, and shop mechanics, so stay tuned!

Teaching your NomHunter about the dishes at locations

Gamification 5: Quiz

Here comes the core of our game. At each location, in order to actually learn about the food they are eating, and to prove they are actually eating at that place, they have to check in and then play a quiz about the dishes on the menu of that restaurant. The score that they earn here is the score that goes on their leaderboard, and if they are the highest scorer, they get featured on the map! At the end, they earn the badge for their NomJournal, game score, progression, and in the future (maybe) a discount for their meal!

It was great fun designing the game mechanics of this quiz. Before we arrived at this idea, there were many ideas of what game we could use to prove the user has indeed eaten at the location. But a key part of this game we wanted to achieve was for the player to learn about the food and the restaurant, and not just check in aimlessly, so a quiz about their menu would be a great way to educate and also sell the dishes of restaurants we could even partner with in the future!

And that's our progress so far! Hope you enjoyed my presentation of what I've designed so far! We're still building the rest of the app and also our website, so stay tuned to future updates!

Let me know what your thoughts are and whether you would play such a food-game!

-----

See the full project at: https://dribbble.com/zlcreative

-----  

Like what you see? Get in touch with me: zlcreativedesigns@gmail.com