Village Builder

Designer

Village Builder is a real time strategy game developed for children in Africa who are HIV/malaria affected.

Village Builder is one game in a collection of mini games called BPG Africa. BPG Africa is a grant-funded research study project that is being used to measure cognitive functions in the children. Village Builder was designed to specifically improve executive brain function (decision, reasoning, and planning).

Team Size: 7
Duration: 5 months
Engine: Unity

Responsibilities:

Game Designer
- Learned about executive functions of the brain and determined how complex gameplay should be for the children. Our goal was to design a real time strategy game for children around 6 years old who have never played a game before
- Researched the African setting to ensure test subjects would understand the items in the game. This was important as the children would already be learning how to play the game, and we didn't want them to be hung up on learning about the context of the game
- Communicated with clients to update on progress and ask questions involving their study

Paper Prototype

Created to test initial systems before full development took place
Oversaw playtesting of coworkers and took notes on how the game played
Flushed out all core mechanics so programmers could hit the ground running when full development took place

Village Builder

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Responsibilities: