LookingOutwards10-jooheek

Heather Kelley – Perfect Plum

Website: http://www.perfectplum.com/

Perfect Plum is the design concern of Heather Kelley, a veteran game designer, digital artist and media curator. It focuses on under-explored aesthetic experiences and sensory interactions (smells, sounds, touch, etc.). Heather Kelley has an extensive career in the gaming industry, as she has contributed in the design and production of AAA next-gen console games, interactive smart toys, handheld games, research games, and web communities for girls. She was named one of the five most powerful women in gaming by Inc. magazine in 2013. In 2011, she was named one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company.

One of her projects that I thought was interesting was SUPERHYPERCUBE, a VR game that was the launch title for PlayStationVR. It is an intuitive shape-matching gameplay where you control a group of cubes, rotating it to fit through a hole in a series of floating walls that are constantly moving toward you. As you keep making goals, your cube gets bigger, which makes you lean around it to see the hole coming, and makes you think quickly about what moves to make to make it fit. I thought this game was very intuitive because it makes you really think about how to play the game. It was also very interesting because it is a virtual reality game, which I personally always find very interesting and exciting. I also like the aesthetics of this game where it doesn’t use a real life setting, but a made up, designed space. Of course it could work as a 2D game as well, but because it is 3D and in virtual reality, it makes the game more interesting and more intuitive by making you use a lot of your senses.