Guitar Fretter Mini Poster

The mini poster for Guitar Fretter’s new style.

A new look

To separate the problems of designing an aesthetic from designing the updated game screens I made this mini poster. A few weeks ago I shared an earlier work in progress, the mini poster is now ready and sets a foundation for the visual style of Guitar Fretter.

A new structure to the navigation

Another problem to manage is the flow of the navigation.

What happens now in Guitar Fretter, you immediately choose among a few kinds of things at once: primary choices like game modes and also side choices like how-to-play. In order to expand features in the future and to have it make sense along side the upcoming paired-down free version I needed to take a fresh look at the navigation.

I actually love to consider conceptual flow, meaning, and structure of experiences. A different and still fun problem to solve than the visual style. It's the Information Architecture of the game. Information architecture is where you can solve the unseen problems of meaning and relatability when you create something for someone else. Choosing words, grouping concepts, what happens first, next, and after.

I took a look at the structure of ideas in Guitar Fretter that get you from the start of the game into playing levels. I revised it to be simpler now and with what I'll be adding next. This is another one of those blog post notes to future me - write about information architecture because it's such a fun space to solve problems and make a big difference for users experience in apps and games of all kinds.

Conceptual structure of Guitar Fretter. If you’re curious about what app I used: Scapple. That’s the app I use most often to layout an outline for the flow of apps and web sites.

Start Screen In Progress

Now with the new style + information architecture I'm ready to redesign a few screens starting with, well, the start screen.

Work in progress for Guitar Fretter’s new start screen.

Games take forever to make except sometimes they don't and it just feels that way.

I'll keep sharing updates as I make progress on the new Guitar Fretter versions. Still thinking later in Q1 for publishing timeline but that's a rough guess. Seriously can't wait to get these new versions out, I'm excited about the new look.