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!
Super Academy is a visual novel style game intended to show, not tell, young players the importance of going to school.
Set in a school for superheroes, the game focuses on how high attendance yields super rewards. It is up to the player to decide whether their hero will go to school or stay home each day. How many stars and what kinds of powers their hero gets depends on the decisions they make.
Characters
Players are able to choose from six superhero characters, each with a unique set of powers and abilities they can learn as they go to school.
Powers
Going to school allows the hero to learn super powers, while staying home earned silly powers. A calendar helps the hero keep track of their progress.
Storylines & Events
Going to school resulted in the hero doing something interesting, while staying at home was less interesting and more repetitive.
In addition to their day to day activities, heroes also encounter multi-day storylines. In order to achieve a good ending, heroes would have to attend school on the days that that story took place. (This knowledge was hidden from the player so they would be encouraged to attend school every day.) If they missed a story-day, the storyline would have a negative ending, or would be skipped entirely. Storylines also emphasized the larger lessons of the program, such as being responsible.
Special positive events such as field trips or parties trigger when the hero goes to school enough days in a row, while special negative events trigger when they stay home consecutively.
Quizes
If the hero has attended school, then they will know the knowledge required to do well on the quiz. As such the quiz will display a simple grade-appropriate problem. If they have not attended school, then the quiz will appear much harder and be impossible to solve.
End of the game
By doing well on quizzes and keeping their attendance high, the hero earned stars. Earn enough stars, and the player can see their hero level up and earn a spectacular superhero name. Fail to earn stars, and the hero appears dejected and earns a silly, less favorable name.
Overall styling
One of the goals of this game was to incorporate a comic book aesthetic by having a limited color pallet and thick outlines. This also influenced the styling and arrangement of the ui.
Unity
