Personalizable Air Hockey installation – concept, ux and screendesign

Concept

I start the project with some research on air-hockey and soccer mobile games. The idea was to make a soccer game with a bit more depth where the player looks inside a wooden box that has a nice elegant stone surface and not just on a flat court as on the classic air-hockey arcade game. This way the game itself got more personalizable areas, where customers could put their logo or other brand material on it.

So as the first step I created some fast sketches in Illustrator to figure out the basic proportions of the ball and the two goals, in addition, I experiment with different depths of the inner court based on the final resolution of the screen. After that, I draw the all necessary court lines and export the file as a base for the screen layout in Photoshop.

Gameplay variants

Besides the standard gameplay of the classic air-hockey, I thought about some kind of unique selling points for this game, to make it more interesting to potential customers and players.
One idea was to shrink the size of the goal after one player reaches a specific score, so it would get harder to win. The second idea was to offer a multi-player version of the game so they could play more people at once on a bigger screen. Another idea was to make some kind of special move or powerup after one player reached 3 goals in a row or a clock at the center of the court that counts the play time down.

Screen layout

The final screen layout was created in Photoshop from scratch. I used some textures for the stone and wood finish of the surfaces, the other graphics are done in combination with Illustrator.

Final Game

The final game was Build from a different team member in Unity. He did a really good job on this and added some nice animations and particle effects that make the game more interesting. Please make sure to watch the short video to see it in action.