Gabb Global
Spanish Learning Games
Developed for Gabb Global, a startup running out of Washington DC, Space Race is an iOS game designed to optimize teaching players Spanish vocabulary words by keeping them in the state of flow. I achieved this through focusing on creating time-based challenges, crunchy feedback, and a sense of competition, initially against another player, but this would eventually be changed to an NPC opponent for the player to race against.
Space Race
Creating engaging feedback design
A significant challenge of this project was creating engaging feedback for the player. I built a responsive environment through as kinesthetic feedback. This includes the camera zooms that emphasize important player actions when the player answers a question correctly, as well as phone vibrations when a player gets a question wrong on mobile versions.
Additional game-feel aspects, including sound design, really helped Space Race carve out a more visceral feel. The unending, high tempo, looping background score heavily contributes to the game retaining this intense level of energy; a dynamic, zooming and shaking camera system works to emphasize high impact moments.
Post Mortem
We created the mini-game Space Race to teach the player vocabulary words in an engaging way. The game experience focuses on creating an immediate and visceral state of flow to help the player learn vocabulary words intuitively. I designed the game to be engaging in both desktop and mobile environments.
My Approach:
I focused on heavily on creating an exciting experience for the player. The art in this project is a large contributor to this feeling, featuring bright, punchy colors to get the player excited to play. I underscored the entire experience with a seamless, looping drum and bass song to give the whole project a kind of kinetic feel.
While I wanted the experience to be engaging for the player, I didn’t want the gameplay to be particularly challenging in itself, because the intent was still focused around learning. I knew from the beginning that feedback on the outcome of questions would have to be immediate and exciting, and that the failure state couldn’t hinge directly upon the number of questions the player got right and wrong. The introduction of an NPC opponent was the most viable method to provide a feeling of tension without using an overly unforgiving system, like a health system based upon number of questions correct.
Learnings:
The core learning, I took away from this project was primarily technical. I learned the importance of writing easily scalable, modular code bases for a project of any size. After the project was funded for expansions upon the original pitch, I found a challenge in that my original project structure became unwieldy and ultimately hampered productivity. Due to this experience I created stronger more modular systems in subsequent projects.
In addition, I found that having a tighter focus while prototyping is a great advantage. While this project originated as something with a tight turnaround time, not having a super concrete idea of what the project was supposed to be in the long run ended up strangling productivity as the core focus would be changed. Assets and systems would need to be updated and polished, hampering productivity overall. It is far easier to spend an extra week creating hard and soft prototypes to nail down the look, feel and exact intent rather than to develop on the fly.
Focus for the Future:
Going into the future, I’m focused on creating more streamlined, easy to work with code bases in order to make the development more efficient, and to help support a more polished final product. I also will set aside more time for planning and prototyping going forward, so that the user experience will be defined right off the bat.
Reading
Comprehension Ascension
Making Studying Engaging
A big design challenge was making a reading comprehension test engaging. Gabb Global was heavily focused on creating a sense of place in this project, so I implemented animated background assets that would build a fantasy for the player to engage with. I chose to show the player that the game begins in the city of Barcelona, and have them progress through the atmosphere and into space.
Similarly, to Space Race, the intent of Reading Comprehension Ascension is to provide an engaging means of teaching players reading comprehension skills through exciting gameplay.
My Approach:
This project is all about generating a longer form of engagement than Space Race. While Space Race focused on immediate crunchy feedback, Reading Comprehension Ascension keeps the player immersed, while also giving them long passages to read. The way that I found to work best for this is to parse out words at a specific cadence. At the same time, I provide an entertaining back drop so that the player feels that they are making meaningful progress. This system provides engagement without a ton of challenge, which is good for the purposes of a study aid.
Implementation was much more direct and streamlined with this iteration of project. These systems allowed me to consolidate string data more directly, and also allowed me to more easily edit it. This made it much easier to scale the project to more languages and difficulties once those elements were commissioned.
Learnings:
I found that reading comprehension games like these have a fairly finite attention curve, and pacing is incredibly important. Players get tired after several minutes and need spaces to catch their breath.
I also found that code bases can always be made more streamlined and modular. While the processes of managing string data for developers was much clearer than in my previous system, the code base for sorting strings would have benefitted from greater modularity. Making this more modular would have made the code bass less fragile and decreased the amount of time I spent fixing bugs in the initial stages of development.
Focus for the future:
Going forward, I will spend more time prototyping gameplay systems, which will allow for stronger moment-to-moment gameplay in the long run, and better long-term pacing. Identifying pacing issues in a grey-box build will be much better in the long run because learning content can be paired down more directly to match the game.
Re-using this dialogue system that I developed for this title would be prudent, since it is very clear to use from a data-management standpoint. I will create modifications to make the code base more modular, but these will assuredly come with iteration.
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