In collaboration with the Department of Family and Community Health Sciences at Rutgers University.
Dates : December 2020 – May 2021
Summary of Project
These games are for teaching food and nutrition to kindergarteners. Each game deals with a specific food group or nutrient source. Featured are Skelly’s Search for Dairy , Parts of a Plate, and My Plate.
My contributions and lessons learned
Great care was taken for designing these games. From initial concepts and making sure the game design reflected the intended learning objectives; to using voice acting and dyslexia accessible fonts so everyone could follow along. Since we were designing for such a young age group, we wanted to make each game as visually appealing and as simple as possible to follow along. We worked with our clients asking them “How can we make things easier for the kids? Would this make it easier to understand? As teachers, what have you seen works best in certain lessons?”. As game designers and instructional designers, it is always wonderful hearing fellow teacher on their best practices and how they incorporate them into their lessons. We also understand the importance of education UX design and providing a clean vision of what this game hopes to accomplish. We end up learning from each project as well, something my department and I value very highly.
As the Project Manager, I started off the project by keeping regular meetings and communications between the our team and the stakeholders. Using the intake forms I created for our department, this later progressed into post it boards to simplify the main concepts of each game. After managing the client expectations for these projects, I worked with the main developer for these games to create a timeline for content deadlines. Afterwards, we created storyboards for each game. I facilitated the pitch meetings and pitched my own game, and then created the statement of work contract after we got the buy in.
I specifically worked on the game design, storyboards and game flow for the Dairy Game outlined below. I also created a few of the art assets for this game in designing tool “Procreate”. I also handled the audio direction by talking to our Audio team. The game features voice acting so that the intended audience can follow along. I voice acted for the Dairy Game as well as the other two games. I wrote a few lines of dialogue for each game, as well as recorded and edited the clips for our developer to use for the final game.
For Parts of a Plant, and Nutrition Game, I acted more like a Project Manager. I ensured client communications were kept up during the development, voice acted and edited audio, the audio boards and directions were also plotted out on vision boards. I also dealt with communications when our timeline was not going to be met, and we had to delay the game due to staffing issues and furloughs due to Covid. The rest of my involvement was shielding the development team from any other projects so they could focus on this project. Being able to communicate the delays and issues we’ve encountered, as well as miscommunications with the stakeholders was also a bit challenging. It’s always difficult to deliver the bad news but clear communication is always valued over uncomfortable talks. However, this gave the chance to work on these issues as a team and give recommendations straight from our developers. I found that ensuring that the developers have a voice and are present to showcase their work not only boosts their mood from the praise we would receive but also boost morale to put our best foot forward on these games.
Ending thoughts
It’s always difficult to feel like you failed or make mistakes. But that means there are places for improvement. It shows that I have tried to accomplish something. Small obstacles in a project can be overcome as long as I have the support of my team. Having some communications issues with the client to narrow down the scope was an issue overcome by talking things through with the team, producing visuals and making sure the clients’ needs were heard and understood. The rest of development was smooth sailing after hitting a small rough patch.
These games are extremely sweet but unfortunately are private at the request of the client. Screens and showing the behind the scenes have been approved.
