10Up App Development - How to work through design hurdles

Hopefully you all caught a glimpse of my previous post sharing that early stage graphic design has begun (and why and what tool). Well if you look carefully at the image there there is an image of one of the number designs.

The intention was to go with circles surrounding the number and would involve creating each digit possible and number. But there is a fundamental issue with this for when a number is not 0-9. i.e. single digits. For a game like 10Up, in theory the maximum number sequence a player could do is 9 x 9 x 9 x 9 which equates to: 6561. It would be unwise to endeavour to create unique individual digit graphics for 6561 numbers AND this doubles in effort each time I decide to add an animation etc.

This is a fundamental problem where in version 1.0 I got around by simply creating squares and adding a text field to the image. Now this is a fine approach, functional even, but one of my goals for 2.0 is a big focus on user interface and user experience.

I am working with 2 idea thought processes right now that I will work through and update here with which path I decide, but essentially I have the original original 10Up theme (Windows 8 Release) which involves unique colourful characters for each digit. and for double digits and above a special character not unique.

The other is a shape or single character holding a rectangle shaped object for which the text field would reside. (less visually appealing)

Currently both need to be explored, and neither may be the answer. But my next step will be to go back to the fundamental goals of the 2.0 update and reverse engineer from there. That's always the technique I go with when rehashing ideas and creating something new.

Identify some variables. Get some inspiration from other places. Go back to the fundamental goals of the project. Open each thought process and explore it. Run through each process possibility in head.

I call it VIGOR - Variables, Inspiration, Goals, Open, Run.

In the next post I'll share the result of my quest and hopefully have some new direction with the overall design.

So here's a question; what do YOU do to get your creative juices flowing and how do you deal with slight bumps in design?

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