Role: Game designer & Developer
This game is part of the Yes! Our Kids Can 2nd Grade app. Yes! Our Kids Can is a small non-profit company in San Antonio Texas, which aims to defeat generational poverty by encouraging children to do well in school and go to college. Play it on Web, IOS, or Android
Keep Focused was designed around the experiance of keeping focus. To communicate this experiance to the player, we tasked them with keeping good, on-task thought bubbles in the air, while avoiding distracting off-task thought bubbles.
When the player successfully keeps good thought bubbles on screen, the character appears more focuses on their task. Dropping thought bubbles results in a loss of focus. In each level the good thought bubbles are related to what the character is trying to do. Ex: Help Dan focus on singing for his choir performance.
The levels featured a mix of professionals and children, providing the player examples of how they can apply focus in their future and daily lives. The game consisted of 3 levels, and reinforced grade-appropriate concepts such as prefixes, graphs, and sight words.
Thought bubbles can be tapped to give them a quick lift, or dragged to “throw” them further. As the player reaches higher levels, more thought bubbles appear on the screen, increasing the difficulty.
Players can also build focus by tapping good pop-able bonus thought bubbles which contain a positive word; but had to avoid the bad pop-able bonus thought bubbles which contain negative words.
Mini Game
Keep Focused reappeared mini-game form as part of the review game in 2nd grade. This presented a unique design challenge: how do we repeat the feeling of the main game, while emphasizing the vocabulary, in a shorter play time? To accomplish this, we gave the player 3 quick levels. In each level they needed to sort the positive and negative words in the correct direction. To ensure player focus, the difficulty increased with each level making it so that players could not rely on visual cues. As a result, players had to read very carefully to sort correctly.
Mini Level 1
Mini Level 2
Mini Level 3
Unity
