The project
Explore a vast island full of interesting animals & beautiful nature. Find the right animals & learn English words along the way.
This game was made with 4 people for the Applied games course at Howest DAE. We had to make an educational/applied game for a client.
The game is made as a teaching supplement for English bioligy classes in primary schools. Specifically for people whose native language is not English. It teaches them both animal characteristics and English words.
In the game, you have to find as many correct animals (that have certain criteria) as possible within a time limit. Getting right animals rewards you with some extra time.
The target audience in our case was 10-12 year olds. This means we were pretty restricted in the complexity of both the game and the controls.
My contribution
The game was made by 4 people over the course of 1 semster. During preproduction, there were no real set roles within the team and we all helped with brainstorming and prototyping. During production, I did the level design first and afterwards helped out where I could on a variety of things.
The applied games course taught me a lot about the full dev cycle of a game. I’d never worked with a team on a bigger project before (the game was made over one semester, each team member putting in about 10 hours per week). Here are some of the main things I was able to learn from that experience:
- Planning: Since this was a larger team project, we used HackNPlan to plan out every sprint. I think the whole experience taught me a lot about dividing work, describing tasks, testing tasks of others etc.
- Documentation: We had a lot of meetings during the development time. We had to create meeting reports as a requirement for the course. I learnt a lot about how to make those: what are the important things to write down, how to organise them etc.
- Client communication: Though Jason did all of the emailing with our client, I still feel like I learnt stuff about how to communicate with a client. I learnt how to interpret their feedback, how to interact with them in meetings etc.
The client wanted a game that teaches English to children through various topics (animals, space…). We brainstormed, first individually and later in group, about different ideas for each topic.
Our final idea was a platforming game where the player had to take pictures of different animals in a 3d world. The pictures would be added to a photo album with some info added to it. Once the player would find every animal, they could print out their own personal album. You can read all about this idea in the high concept document.
After some prototyping, we decided to make some changes to our original idea. The main reason was that the original wasn’t challenging enough. The new game gives the player a set of criteria. Then they have to search around the map for an animal that has all of these criteria.
The player is also timed. If they run out of time, they lose the game. They can regain some time by getting a correct animal or by platforming.
This was my first time designing a level with a more open map. I found it really challenging, because the player can approach every obstacle from every angle. I was really intimidated at first to design this but once I started it became a lot easier.
I ended up placing every obstacle, rock, tree, water, etc. It was really fun to “build” this island and see the player explore it.
In the following pictures and gifs, you can see my progress in chronological order.
Because the level design was done after the first two weeks, I was free to help out the others were they needed it.
I added various animations and particle effects, did game balancing, placed spawn points for everything and fixed some bugs, such as the camera not culling correctly or the player glitching through things.
Credits
Made by:
- Giorgio Allotta
- Art
- Game design
- Tijmen Matthys
- Gameplay code
- Game design
- Joran De Pessemier
- Level design
- Game design
- Jason Cho
- UI Code
- Game design
- Myriam Monterrubio
- Client feedback
- Educational value
