Water+
Genre: Educational Game, 3D Puzzle Sandbox Game
My Role: UI/UX Designer, 2D Artist
Project Duration: 4 months
My Role: UI/UX Designer, 2D Artist
Project Duration: 4 months
I was working on an educational game project this fall. We developed a game to help children understand system thinking theory.
We were working with Creative Labs at Indiana University to promote system thinking design through an educational game for upper elementary and middle school youth. Systems thinking is the process of understanding how components, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole. Our goal is to develop an educational game that can help children express their unlimited creativity and gain understanding about how systems work.
In our game, children need to combine components to build their own system. They should consider not only the characters of each component but also the relationship between components. Eventually, children can learn that a system is not a group of components but interconnections between components. In this way, children can have a hands-on experience in system building. We hope this lesson can give children a broader view about how things around them work. With our game, children will enjoy the gameplay while also learning how to think more systemically.
Our game, water+, is a creative platform that children can play with water and design their own pipe system. I was responsible for 2D art and UI art in this project. By creating UI wireframes and prototypes, I designed the game UI flows and visual elements through this semester. I also participated in this project as UX designer who was responsible for contextual inquiry and feedback analysis.
Welcome to Play our game here!
We conducted four playtests with children aged from 10 to 13 who are our perfect target audience throughout this project. The first two playests were aiming to approve our game concept and main mechanics. And during the last two playtest, we got chance to iterate UI design and polish game assets in order to improve user experience.
We were glad to see our game demo was fun to children. During the playtests, we observed some children completed all the levels without listening to instructions and even created their own crazy world in the game. After each playtest, we interviewed some of the children by doing contextual inquiry to get to know more about their experience. And then we had feedback review and data analysis based on the questionaire we gathered. By doing this, we want to make sure if our design is on the right direction and the priority of problems in our to-do list.
We also had peer playtests within the school every two weeks. These playtests helped us find out how was the communication between our game and the user.
Our unique 3D pipe buidling gameplay is attractive yet brings out many design challenges. Having few exsiting games for reference, the limitation of computer equipment in school classroom and complex game turotial design... We started figuring out these problems from changing game UI. To simplify UI elements and tools in the game; to get rid of confucing mechanics and find the more natural way people navigate in 3D space; to saperate the exsiting levels into serval simple levels as tutorials to introduce each tool of the game step by step (redesign learning curve).
Without adding new features or changing the main mechanics, people feel our game changed completely. It is definitely fun and engaging. Some of the people played our game for more than 3 hours during BVW festival (The school game show party, a lot of things going on in the buidling). Children feel excited about our game during the last playtest. They talk to each other to solve puzzles and asking where can they find our game after the playtest.
