Your game, your music.
It's no secret I am a huge PC gamer and I happen to be a bit of a music buff, and I happen to be a designer. So what is a person in my shoes suppose to do? Experiment with some designs and prototypes mixing two of my favorite things together of course.
When I game I do listen to music on Spotify, depending on the game. I often found myself using ALT+TAB a lot to switch playlists, adjust volume, or use the player controls while gaming. This is not a huge problem itself, these days Windows and PC games are far more stable. However they are prone to crashing when using ALT+TAB mid gaming often times.
The biggest problem aside from crashes (while pretty big when it happens) is a game is meant to be an experience and take you into a new world and become immersed into that enviroment/gameplay. By switch applications with ALT+TAB and minimizing the game to use Spotify, you disrupt that immersive experience. Sort of like if you're in a movie theater and every time someone got up to use the restroom the lights would come on. You were so caught up in the movie and those lights coming on (Switching the experience or "ALT+TAB") kills that moment. So, I thought... why not see about making a better experience in gaming, listening to your favorite songs and design a more seamless why to do it.
So I played around with some ideas, and came up with some very straight forward overlay solutions, and thought, why not see if this could be a partnership with Nvidia and Spotify to have this feature built into the Geforce app since Geforce already uses overlays for screen captures and recording. Thus I spent a weekend playing with some designs that meld Geforce and Spotify together, and in the end jumped into AfterEffects and made this idea come to life with a prototype.
Enjoy.
More work and prototypes coming soon...
ROLES
PRODUCT DESIGN
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
PROTOTYPING
MOTION DESIGN
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Music to your gaming ears.
While gaming sometimes you just want to listen to your own music and become more immersed in the game, so with this idea, I figure some simple hotkeys would bring up a player overlay and let you play/control your spotify listening seamlessly mid game without the need to ALT+TAB out of the game. Once a song is playing the player will see the album and sound wave in the lower left corner of the screen, after a few secs this UI element gently fade down some as to not be too much of a distraction to the player but more of a UI extension in the game.
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Well, let's see this in action.
After I was happy with some initial design passes on some overlay UIs and Geforce modules, I wanted to see how this would look in action. I choose to use AfterEffects because some design features would be easier for me to animate in AE than in a prototyping tool like Principle App. Overall the animated mock looks pretty solid, not too distracting while overlaid on a game. I plan to work more on this project and really add some polish to it.
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Hello Geforce, meet Spotify.
While working on the overlay designs, it came to me— that Nvidia has Geforce. GeForce is the companion application to the line of GeForce GTX graphics cards. It updates the cards and optimizes games, but also offers overlay features such as in-depth screen capturing, game recording, streaming and more. So I wanted to meld Spotify into the Geforce application as it seems like a prefect fit in the Geforce ecosystem of features.
I added in a sign-in to Spotify module. Once signed in, this module will sync your Spotify info, avatar, and playlists. For the settings and playlist options, I could have gone down a rabbit hole of use-cases however I choose a more straight forward design of using toggles for imported playlists so a user may hand pick playlists to their choosing. This also would decrease playlist clutter mid-game and allow for choosing only your active playlists and not wade through all of your playlists while mid-game.
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Mobile App.
More coming up...
In addition to the desktop component, I wanted to create a mobile controller app. The app is to act similar to the desktop app but would allow the in-game Spotify music player to be controlled via an app on a smart phone. At this point in my explorations I would like to introduce the mash-up of Spotify's in gamer player and mobile app to also sync with Razers-Chroma software to really tie together and immersive gaming/music experience for a user.
Designs and interactive prototypes on how this would work coming up...
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