Kid Wonder
Summary
Modern twist on a class game. Kid Wonder was a concept for a mobile game.
My role
Creative director and UI UX design.
Goals
Update visuals
Add a new style and look to a classic game.
New features
Add new game mechanics to go with the new visuals.
Don’t lose the charm
Make sure not to lose the charm of the original game.
Constraints
We had features that needed to be in the MVP to really make our product unique. We didn’t want this to just be a reskinned game. The technical restraints were unknown.
How to play
Before players start the game, we gave them a quick “how to play” tutorial to get them started. I wanted it to be short and simple, so I kept it in 3 slides. The tutorial goes over how to maneuver and the objective of the game.
Start!
Loading screens can get mundane and lose the interest of a user if it takes too long. Our game could have taken a long time to load since it required a new engine to play. I saw an opportunity to engage users during the loading screen by using assets from our main game. Corelating the loading percentage with the yellow bar filling up gave players the sense that covering more area is a good thing in this game.
Challenges
I was excited that the space traveler theme was really working well with the game mechanics. But like all fun projects, challenges will come up during development.
New engine
Our concept to allow the player to explore outside of the frame of their phone screen, proved to be a challenging task on the engineering side.
Been here, done that
In order to launch this game with enough content, we needed to plan out a series of maps. Each map had to be unique and engaging to keep players entertained.
Who’s paying the bills?
Our free-to-play model needed a way to return revenue without deterring players.
The show must go on
As the engineer was working on the engine, I worked on the different types of features we could add to keep players engaged. I explored power ups, lives, shields, and a variety of monsters.
To bring in revenue we wanted a energy system where players could play up how much energy they had in their battery. Options to purchase more energy would give us funds to continue developing the game.
Potential
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get a working engine to implement the designs for the final game. I think that was one of the biggest constraints we had for this project. Looking back, I would have liked to move forward with a simple version of the game, so that we could see the potential of the other features we had planned.
