The Scouting Game Camp application is a short interactive level select screen. It was part of a themed activity week for children.
Project
Approach
Use a MoSCoW-style planning to make sure the most important elements are present when the camp starts.
Decided on making it possible to manually fill in information before going to a public state that would be shown to the children. This way, it cost the camp organizers more time to set up the program, but it also gave them more flexibility in how to use it.
Result / Evaluation
Working application with the main elements functional: a character that walks towards a current level in a level-overview screen and certain skills that have an “increase” animation
Application became embedded in the camp’s culture. The children had built little rituals around the application, which was used to start and end their activities for the day
Description
Key design decision
Making the design choice to have users fill in all the required information before it the application could be shown to the children.
This saved development time, which was our scarcest resource. The flipside of this choice was that the camp organizers needed to do a bit more preparation work. However, this also gave them the flexibility to tweak scores when necessary.
Process
We started off by interviewing our contact person at the camp about what they wanted help with. Based on this, we formulated a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), as well as things that would be nice to have, but not absolutely essential.
This MVP proved to be instrumental, as we had very little time available to actually work on the project. (all three project members had other deadlines as well) Because we had prioritized different features upfront, we were able to finish something without having to update the design much.
We worked together with the camp organizers, one of whom voice-acted the transitions in the application.
We were invited to join the camp for half a day, so we could see the application while it was being used.
Project Role
Niels de Jong – design, programming
Melissa Tammens – 3d character modelling & animation
Esmeé van ‘t Hoff – 2d art, contact person
Project Duration
4 weeks (2 weeks actual project time)
26th of June 2017 – 2nd of July 2017
16th of July 2017 – 21st of July 2017
The camp took place from the 22nd to the 29th of July 2017
Play time
3~5 minutes