🥈 2ND PLACE — GAMING TRACK

How do you make a survival game worth a fourth playthrough?

Mind Harvest is a psychological-thriller farming game where you grow infected crops and spread them across the country without getting caught. Our team, the Mango Bangoes, designed, tested, and prototyped the whole concept in a single weekend.

Game UX

Protothon

UX/UI

ROLE

UX/UI Designer · solo

TIMELINE

28hr sprint · 48hr event · 2024

TEAM

Mango Bangoes (3)

TOOLS

Figma · FigJam · Visual Electric · Google Surveys

THE CHALLENGE

Make it worth a fourth playthrough.

The Gaming Track handed us one mandate: design a survival game with re-playability at its core. A loop compelling enough that players come back, again and again, without it ever feeling like a chore.

Re-playability isn't a feature you bolt on. It's a reason to return that you engineer in.

HOURS FROM PROMPT TO SUBMISSION

DESIGNERS, 3 TIME ZONES

RULE: REPLAYABILITY AT ITS CORE

THE CONCEPT

A farmer, a virus, and a country to infect.

Grow infected crops and distribute them across the land without drawing the attention of the authorities or the people you're feeding. Draw too much suspicion and your crop is discovered and destroyed. Three pillars make it unlike anything else in the survival genre:

Psychological horror, turned inward.

The threat isn't a monster in the field. It's the player character, slowly manipulated by the virus growing in their own crops.

Farming as a weapon.

Cultivation meets contagion. The cozy loop of growing and distributing becomes a quiet act of sabotage.

Moral ambiguity by design

A skewed perception and shifting motivations leave players to decide how far they'll go and whether they were ever really in control.

Main game · your mission

THE SPRINT

28 hours, 3 time zones, one concept.

Two teammates in the US, me in Germany. Rather than fight the gap, we ran it as a relay boxing every task to a tight window so the concept could be researched, designed, tested, and polished before time ran out.

Pre-Protothon

Apr 27 – May 3

STRATEGY

Scoped the project, mapped each other's strengths, and set up our Figma so the clock would count for design not setup.

Day 1 · Research

May 4 · 9 AM

SYNTHESIS

Brief → competitive analysis → a survey that pulled 12 responses in one hour → a merged persona.

Day 1 · Definition

May 4 · 7:30 PM

PRIORITISATION

Turned the insights into prioritised features, solved plot holes, and locked the core concept.

Day 2 · Execution

May 5 · 12 AM

MID → HI-FI

Defined HMWs and user flows, then sprinted from mid-fidelity to hi-fi using a moodboard for fast UI calls.

Day 2 · Polish

May 5 · 6 AM

DELIVERY

Final screen detailing, presentation deck, and submission with minutes to spare.

EVIDENCE

We didn't guess what "replayable" means. We asked.

To keep a fast concept honest, we ran a two-pronged research pass looking outward at the market, and straight at players.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

Where the genre falls short

A concise SWOT of three benchmark survival games surfaced the pain points and market gaps we could design against.

3 BENCHMARK GAMES

RAPID USER SURVEY

What makes a player return

A survey built around the elements that make a game worth revisiting, deployed fast and answered faster.

12 RESPONSES IN 1 HOUR

SYNTHESIS

Three things players kept telling us.

We distilled the survey into three actionable needs. The lens every later decision had to pass through.

Lost and confused

Unclear, inconsistent interactions waste players' time and stall their progress before the fun starts.

Challenge me, don't crush me

Players want to be challenged and rewarded with difficulty that stays consistent and balanced at every stage.

Been there, done that

They crave variety and depth no matter how far in they are. Repetition is the fastest way to lose them.

We each drafted a persona, then merged them into one to build around. Meet Ralph, our strategic, easily-bored enthusiast.

FROM PAIN TO FEATURE

Bridging the gap.

Each insight became a How-Might-We, a direct bridge from a player's frustration to a design decision. We used the MoSCoW method to keep only the must-dos we could realistically ship in our 28-hour window.

How might we streamline tutorials and in-game guidance so strategy players never waste time being confused?

How might we balance the difficulty curve so challenge and reward stay satisfying the whole way through?

How might we build impactful choices, branching stories, and varied mechanics that keep play from ever going stale?

THE PAYOFF

Three pain points, three concrete solutions.

We refined the final screens by challenging each other's work until every element earned its place. Each core frustration maps to a specific answer on screen.

PAIN · "LOST AND CONFUSED"

Clear from the very first minute

Players are shown an in depth tutorial during first playthrough to reduce the likelihood of frustration and hindrance at the beginning of their game.

Main game

Tutorial

PAIN · "CHALLENGE ME, DON'T CRUSH ME"

Challenging, then rewarding

Players choose where to spread next across a region map, and tune the difficulty of their next run so, the curve stays balanced and the reward stays earned.

Map

Select difficulty

PAIN · "BEEN THERE, DONE THAT"

Fresh every playthrough

Players can build their skills freely and experience a different strategy every game. Slowly explore what’s been happening in their mind, as well as navigating their environment with others. Keeping things from becoming repetitive and frustrating.

Skill tree

Dialogue options

Cutscene

Visual identity

Dread you can read.

A distressed wordmark rooted in a dead tree, growth turned sinister. Earthy, decaying browns ground the farm, while spore-green and warning-yellow flag what's alive, infected, and not to be trusted.

Char

#2C2328

Oxblood

#372126

Rust

#7E453A

Sand

#8A7A60

Spore green

#64AC27

Warning

#F0D115

MIND HARVEST

Display · Ghost Factory

Grow. Distribute. Don't get caught.

Body · Rosario

OUTCOME

A prototype and a story to sell it.

Our final deliverable was a high-fidelity prototype that fully demonstrated the Mind Harvest concept. We packaged the build and our design rationale into a slide presentation and it landed us 2nd place on the Gaming Track.

2nd

Place overall

Gaming Track · DubsTech Protothon

Survey responses

gathered in a single hour

28hrs

Concept to submission

research, design, test, polish

See the final presentation

LEARNINGS

What I'm taking with me.

Thriving under pressure.

I went in hesitant about a 28-hour grind and came out knowing I can design and execute at a high level when the clock is unforgiving.

Synergy is built before the sprint.

A dedicated session up front to map our strengths, weaknesses, and work styles let us split tasks cleanly and stay in sync the whole way through.

Strategic pauses buy clarity

Team-supported breaks when we were blocked or fried weren't lost time because we came back sharper, kept morale up, and refined the concept for the final stretch.

Let's make something

together.

v4.0 · Made in Framer with a small dance break