Game App Icon
Title
Donna’s
Ducklings
Genre
Educational
Digital Toy
Platform(s)
Android
Revenue model
Paid
Development tools/Language
Unity/C#/GLSL
Audacity
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe
Illustrator
Git/Underdog
Game audience
Preschool-aged
Children
Team
Aaron Triplett
·
Designer
·
Developer
Kari
Triplett: Author of Donna’s Ducklings (2017), a children’s book with the same
name.
·
Content
Creator
·
Subject
Matter Expert
Copyright/Reference
Triplett,
A. (2018). Donna’s Ducklings [Unpublished mobile game].
NOTE: Kari
Triplett was a planned member of the team but due to a misunderstanding of her
expected level of involvement, she did not contribute anything to this project
other than the sound bite below and occasional feedback from user testing. That
is why I am not including her name in the reference for the game.
Backstory:
Sound Bite
“Join Donna and friends for games
and play, while learning lessons along the way!” (Triplett, K., 2018)
Executive Summary
Donna’s Ducklings (Triplett, A.,
2018) is an educational digital toy for preschool-aged children focusing on the
development of fine motor skills, counting, shape recognition, color
recognition, and size differentiation. The characters and farm theme are loosely
based on the story, Donna’s Ducklings (Triplett, K., 2017). Each area of the
farm will have a unique activity focused on one or more of these early childhood
development goals.
Inspiration
My wife recently published her first
children’s book and has been having trouble marketing it. I intended for this
game to be a digital companion to that book to extend the brand and help expose
potential customers to the story through another medium. There were some
concerns about existing royalty agreements associated with that particular book.
As a result, the project was rebranded
as Donna’s Ducklings (Triplett, A., 2018) and was intended to be an extension
to the children’s story, Donna’s Ducklings (Triplett, K., 2017), which has yet
to be published as of this writing.
The design of the game was inspired
by Sago Mini Farm (Sago Mini Toys Inc., 2017) and Monkey Preschool Lunchbox
(THUP Games, LLC, 2010). The planned design included a hide-and-seek game where
the player is asked to search the farm for Donna’s ducklings who are hiding in
random locations throughout the game. This feature would have led to game
mechanics similar to Sago Mini Farm (Sago Mini Toys Inc., 2017) but this
feature did not make it into the final version of the capstone project.
Capstone Game Scope
The original planned scope of the
game included four areas of the farm each having a unique educational activity,
a hide-and-seek game acting as a global mini-game, a Global Reward System
awarding ribbons and stars for completing activities, an Intelligent Tutoring
System to provide a more targeted learning experience tailored for the needs of
the user based on gameplay, a Farm Map scene tying all areas of the farm
together using a parallax scrolling effect, a Parental Gateway designed to
prevent young children from entering a special scene intended for parents, a
Dialogue Manager that would synchronize the display and animation of words on
the screen to go along with the audible narration, and a cloud-based content
delivery mechanism for possible future content updates.
Two additional areas of the farm were
also planned in case the project had proven to be under-scoped. The project was
not under-scoped, it was over-scoped. The scope was reduced by removing the
Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), the global mini-game, two of the four
educational activities, and the cloud-based content delivery system.
The Dialogue Manager was removed
earlier on in the project because the author did not provide the expected
storybook content. With no story to feed into the Dialogue Manager, it was
removed. To counter this loss, a Profile Management System was the added.
Ideal
If everything had gone right, the
game would have looked as described above. Of all the features that did not
make it into the final version, the loss of the Dialogue Manager led to the largest
departure from the original intent of the game. The intent was to give the game
a storybook feel based on the children’s book by integrating storybook elements
presented by the Dialogue Manager in a read-along format using animation to
draw attention to each word as it was read aloud by the narrator. The ideal
version of the game would have acted as an extension of and digital companion
to the story.
Demo Screencast:
Link to final screencast including demo of basic gameplay: https://youtu.be/gZGBjIWf7So
The Critique: What
went right
Design & Aesthetics
Activities and interactions use
repetition and multi-sensory feedback to help the user develop the desired early
childhood educational goals. To exercise
fine motor skills and hand eye coordination, the player is asked to perform
various touch gestures. This includes dragging from one source to many targets,
many targets to one source, one source to a specific target based on matching
criteria and performing a pinching gesture.
Each activity is split into three
parts: an introduction, intermission, and quiz. I felt that is was too
challenging for the target audience to begin immediately by asking for specific
shapes and colors without introducing them by name first. I also felt it was
too simple to follow the introduction immediately with a quiz. The intermission
separates these two parts by providing the user with an unrelated task intended
to be fun while challenging the player to exercise specific fine motor skills.
The selected music tracks received
only positive feedback. I intentionally picked these tracks for their energy. The
theme song is fun and energetic like a galloping horse for the non-activity
scenes. For the activity scenes, the background music is slower and more
thoughtful.
Core Game Mechanics
Each
young tester who played the game had at least one moment during gameplay when
his or her face lit up. They also unanimously provided verbal feedback that the
game was fun. The game mechanics in this game are deceptively simple. In
reality, it was quite difficult to create the interactive sequences used in the
activity scenes because of the branching logic used that also had to be
forgiving of inaccurate input from target demographic all while remaining
synchronized with narration composed of numerous audio clips that all had to
come together in a way that sounded natural and made sense in the context of
the user’s input which isn’t always the input expected.
Development
I
was able to create several reusable systems that will be very useful in future
projects. For example, the physics-based touch system, a game-state manager
providing automatic persistence of data, a profile selection and management
system, a general-purpose event system, a two-dimensional sprite outline effect
shader, and a simple yet powerful replacement for visual scripting languages that
is entirely Unity-based with no third-party dependencies or unmanaged code.
The Critique: What
went wrong
Design & Aesthetics
I was unable to find professional
artwork for all visual elements required by the game’s design that would have
been compatible with existing assets used for the animals and the farm. In
those cases, I had to create my own artwork. For example, I created the treats,
brush, and spray bottle used in the horse pen and everything in the chicken
coop except the chickens and the barn used in the home icon. The game would
have looked more polished if all visual elements had been created by a single
artist or studio.
Project Management
The project was over-scoped.
Deadlines were missed because there was simply too much to do. I did a poor job
of communicating these challenges with these advisors. As a result, the project
scope was not adjusted until very late in the project at which point it was too
late to do much other than just cutting features.
Development
Bugs were allowed to pile up. This
led to a situation where there were so many bugs to fix that fixing them became
a significant issue in itself requiring several days dedicated to bug fixes
alone. Also, fixing one bug often led to another creating a cascading effect.
Unit testing was not used which sometimes made it more difficult to determine
whether or not a bug fix impacted existing code.
Testing
It was difficult to schedule testing
with preschool-aged children. In most cases, there was simply not a time or day
that worked with my schedule and that of the child’s parents. In one case where
the child did come for play testing, I made the mistake of allowing the child
to play with my daughter before we started leading to a situation where the
child did not want to stop what they were doing for the test which led to tears
and being excused from testing. In the remaining successful attempts at user
testing, very little useful feedback was given outside of my own observation of
what the child seemed to be struggling with in the user interface. This is a
difficult demographic to test.
Business Model/Plan
I meant for this project to be a
synergistic business venture and collaborative effort between myself and my
wife who is the author of the children’s book with the same name. She did not
provide the necessary story elements required to link this game to the book so
the intended use of this game as an extension of the brand and marketing tool
is not possible.
Summary:
To conclude, I will quote from the
artist’s critique that I, Aaron Triplett, wrote for this project:
According to the Artist Classroom
(2013), Donna’s Ducklings would be best received by an instrumentalist critic
who can appreciate the educational value of the game. The various artistic
elements of the game may not be perfectly balanced or executed but the intent
of the game is to teach or reinforce fundamental early childhood education
goals in a way that is fun and engaging. Through user testing, I have seen
faces light up and I have heard a great deal of positive feedback until the
player realizes there are only two activities and quickly loses interest.
Repetition may be good for learning
and retention, but monotony leads to boredom which spoils the fun. To be
brutally honest, the game simply does not have enough content to hold a
player’s interest for long. Adding the remaining activities will help, but I
think the hide-and-seek mini-game where the players search for the ducklings
will help even more. Unfortunately, the activities themselves are still too
repetitive. To enhance longevity, the game would need to add a significant
amount of content and variations of each interaction to break up the monotony.
I think the scope of this project
was just too large for the time allotted. It seemed deceptively simple but
turned out to be quite difficult to implement. The difficulty stems from the
interactive cutscenes with branching logic having to deal with no input,
partial input, or correct input piecing all of the bits of dialogue together in
a way that makes sense given the potentially mixed types of input given throughout
the interaction while synchronizing the animation, actionability, and
visibility of each object in the scene including any dependent states or
interactions. No single component is overly complicated but they all interact
in a complex web that can easily become tangled (2018, Judgment section).
References:
Foriero
Studio. (2016). Farm Animals 2D Volume 1 [Icon].
Sago Mini
Toys Inc. (2017). Sago Mini Farm [Mobile game]. Canada: Author.
THUP
Games, LLC. (2010). Monkey Preschool Lunchbox [Mobile game]. United States:
Author.
Triplett,
A. (2018). Artist’s Critique: Donna's Ducklings [Class assignment]. Midland, MI: Author.
Triplett,
A. (2018). Donna’s Ducklings [Unpublished mobile game].
Triplett,
K. (2016). Buttercup the Unicorn. United States: Archway Publishing.
Triplett,
K. (2017). Donna’s Ducklings [Unpublished manuscript].
Triplett,
K. (2018). Soundbite for Donna’s Ducklings. Midland, MI: Author.
