Brainpowered Games Africa: Village Builder
Brainpowered Games Africa: Village Builder (BPG) is a kid-friendly Real Time Strategy project developed by the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University. BPG is played, as part of a research project, by children in Malawi and Uganda. The game is an example of computerized cognitive rehabilitation therapy (CCRT) and is meant to help kids with developmental disabilities improve their executive function.
I joined this project as the primary designer after the developers who were previously responsible for it graduated from MSU.
Team Size: 6
Platforms: iPad
My Role: Game Design Intern
My responsibilities:
Iterate on existing mechanics, including system mechanics, to increase the overall quality of the game.
Create new mechanics and buildings to facilitate players planning ahead.
Coordinate the efforts of artists and programmers.
Build tools to improve the workflow for all members of the team.
System Design
This was an interesting project to design for because the primary aim of the game wasn’t just to entertain. I wanted to create mechanics that prompted players to think ahead, because that was an element that can help the kids who would be playing the game improve their executive function.
The Trading Post is a new building I designed to add to the game. It allows players to swap resources for another resource type of their choice. If you trade away the Trading Post’s “demanded resource” you get a better rate of exchange.
This building opens up some new level design opportunities, and some more opportunities for players to think ahead. Levels can require resources that aren’t present in resource nodes, and players need to think about how they’re going to trade to get the resources they need. The player is rewarded if they focus on collecting the in-demand resource, which requires planning in advance.
For example, a player could choose to grow maize in their farms in order to efficiently trade in the level pictured to the left.
Tool Development
I also had the opportunity to develop some tools to improve the team’s workflow on BPG.
One tool that was a major timesaver is the Animation Builder pictured to the right. This allowed our 2D Artists to bring in sprite sheets for new villager units and turn them into complete game-ready animation clips without having to manually assign keyframes for each animation.
Artists are able to simply drag sprites into the Unity editor, and click the “Build from Animation Sheets” button. The tool creates and saves animation clip assets, that can then be easily assigned to an animator override asset to get them quickly working in the game.
Before we had this tool it would take many hours of mundane work to implement art for a new villager into the game. Being able to generate these clips programmatically opened up the artists to spend their time on creating more art for the game.
Sample Code
Here is a piece of sample code from this project. This is a good example of a tool class built specifically to speed up the workflow of my team.
