To diversify the genres offered in Albert Junior - English, the product owner (PO) requested a platform game to to give relevant vocabulary practice for children that is engaging, and retainable. In collaboration with the creative director (CD) of the product, it was determined that the platformer would be set on a construction site following the app's city theme.
A few requirements were defined from the end user's perspective following the PO and CD's directives. Thus, as a user:
Albert Junior - English has a broad target audience. And for an action game such as a platformer, we wanted to validate the game's theme and ensure that its mechanics would appeal to players with various skill levels. Therefore, it was decided to produce a minimum viable product (MVB) with the game's core mechanics so we could collect the maximum amount of validated learnings from real users through usability tests.
The first version of the game consisted of a spelling and action games mashup. It required words to be spelled correctly, letter by letter, on each level, and the core mechanics consisted of collecting each letter by running over it as the player character. In summary, the game premise consisted of helping users practice and improve their English by taking the user character on a quest through a construction site to spell words correctly.
Once we had the game premise laid out, a basic user flow and low-fidelity wireframes helped communicate the concept to different teams. Following the outlined blueprint of the game, the art team produced the initial visual representation of the game's artwork used on a mid-fidelity prototype.
The mid-fidelity prototype enabled formative research with ten children (ages from 5 to 9) when we assessed how the game's features interrelate on each other. Since this was the first time that the company was experimenting with this new type of gameplay the usability testing allowed us to observe what feelings were being evoked through gameplay.
After interviews and observation of user's behavior, an evaluation was conducted to assess children's feedback and parents' input.
The collection of insights and anecdotes about how children used the prototype were analysed and converted into redesign recommendations for the next iteration.
We observed that the first version's level design didn't match the fine motor skills of younger children, especially 5-6-year-old users, who couldn't clear certain levels that required a high degree of control and precision.
Kids and parents voiced their confusion with the spelling and action match-up. They expressed how they expected to learn a vocabulary connected to the location's theme. Therefore, we decided to give the game a new focus: colors.
One of the main reasons to change the game's focus was the observation that users were not connecting the spelled words with their meanings. The letters were random symbols to be collected but weren't seen as representations of sounds.
We observed that the levels presented too difficult challenges for the target audience, which caused frustration and resulted in the player's disinterest. On the other hand, the users evaluated the overall gameplay positively.
A few users voiced their dissatisfaction with the game's jumping controls. So a jumping config was created, allowing the jump's customization with different settings until we arrived at the best evaluated jumping controls.
The users complained about the levels' predictability. They rapidly memorized the levels' challenges which caused frustration because they already knew what to expect. Therefore, we decided to apply a modular design to the levels.
Following what was discovered during the usability testing, a new user flow was produced to display the complete path the user takes when playing with the new game theme.
Parkour is a platformer set on a construction site where the players need to run and jump their way through sections full of scaffolds, traffic cones, and boxes to collect paint buckets and learn the name of the colors.
Due to the game's linear progression, the game's levels are designed as modular obstacle courses randomly assembled for each turn. This way, users can play the same level but experience a different flow.
In Parkour - Run & Jump, the player-character is always moving in one constant direction through the platform, in which the player jumps over oncoming gaps and obstacles. The set of controls is limited to a single screen tap for jumping to suit both tablet and mobile.
With the intent to allow users to take risks when playing, there's no finite number of tries before a game over. Instead, we implemented a restart mechanism that enables the player-character to restart running from checkpoints when they die.
#1 MVP with Maximum Viable Planning
In a development process based on short-loop feedback, sometimes we can end up handing over to development an ill-specified feature because we didn't have time to understand how such feature will interrelate with existing ones completely. Therefore, to avoid not doing enough thinking through features, we need to develop an MVP with maximum viable planning.
#2 Implementing physics into the game
When developing an action game, user testing is essential to guarantee that we have achieved realistic behavior when applying fundamental dynamics principles to the player character. Like adults, children expect objects to behave the way they do in real life, so when using physics in a game, we can expect that if the objects behave out of the ordinary, the users will struggle to figure out how to play.
#3 Thinking through the major edge cases
An action game produces much more edge cases compared to the other game genres developed so far. We must consider this extra time beforehand to think through these situations outside the standard gameplay flow.