GravyStack
GravyStack is a gaming/banking app meant to teach kids good financial lessons through minigames and IRL activities. In my role, I conceptualized the game mechanics, created wireframes and interactive prototypes for each of the missions, and reviewed client feedback to iterate on my designs. Additionally, led efforts between gaming and art teams that included supplying the art team with story information, assets required for minigames, and initial character concepts.
Challenge
There is a general feeling from high school graduates that school does not properly prepare them with the financial knowledge that they need when entering adult life.
Objective
GravyStack will create an entertaining and informative gaming experience that will educate kids about financial lessons before they graduate high school.
Solution
Create a world for kids to explore that would allow them to interact with characters, complete missions, and gain a better financial understanding. The world will consist of 10 levels, each with their own guide that will focus on a specific financial topic. Levels will be broken down into 10 missions with a combination of minigames, research missions, and IRL activities.
Duration: 13 Months
Methods: Expert/Specialist Interviews, User Interviews, Wireframes, Prototyping
Tools: Figma, Google Suite, Abode Photoshop
Windfall
A world once in harmony is now thrown into financial ruin by evil influences. The Player must assist The Guardians in teaching the citizens of Windfall good financial lessons through virtual minigames and IRL missions!
Levels
Players will progress through 10 levels each with its own financial topic. On each level a new Guardian will introduce themselves and help guide the player in learning new financial lessons.
Research
Research primarily consisted of competitive analysis on other mobile games in educational gaming space. One early influence was a game called Prodigy which taught kids math through a Pokemon style gaming system. Although the gameplay did not fit the style of teaching we wanted to achieve, the idea of a large world to explore was one that intrigued the team early on. I presented this research along with quantitative client data gathered to the leadership team before deciding on a direction for the gameplay to take.
Mission Design
I began the design phase by creating an outline for all future missions to follow. Through the use of this template, all missions could contain a consistent experience throughout the several different types of missions with a range of different objectives and gameplay.
Here are my initial wireframes for the intro, tutorial, and end screens.
Mission Creation Process
Mission creation would begin by meeting with a specialist from a specific financial topic (saving, banking, etc.). We would ideate on what were good lessons to teach kids about each topic.
In the design phase, I would take these lessons, gamify them, introducing minigame mechanics, then wireframes/prototypes were created to test with kids.
Here is the first iteration of an early minigame mission.
Certain assets/elements have been changed for NDA purposes.
Design to Dev
After many iterations with feedback gathered from kids, parents, dev and leadership teams, I would pass a final design, like this, over to our dev team.
I would also supply them with any variables they would need for the game such as item names, scoring system requirements, how and when combos applied, recommended effects, etc.
Avatar Creation
In early testing, we found that kids were more willing to learn financial topics if they felt more connected to the world they were interacting with. Giving the players an avatar to customize served this purpose and allowed us to add in additional rewards through new cosmetics earned by completing milestones or special events in game.
Challenges
The largest challenge I faced when designing the game was creating a consistently engaging experience for an audience that could range from 7-18 yrs old. A short term and long term solution were explored to fix this challenge:
In the short term, we would create difficultly choices for each minigame that included a recommended age range. This solved the issue of minigames being to easy for older kids and still allowed younger kids to progress.
Long term, younger and older kids would have two separate gaming experiences. This would be determined when they created their avatar the first time and would included unique minigames/missions that better engaged with their specific age range.
Accomplishments
Personally designed and prototyped 50+ missions with a wide range of complexity, an in app store, and assisted in designing many areas of the banking side include the onboarding process.
Lead efforts between gaming and art teams this included supplying the art team with story information, assets required for minigames, and initial character concepts.
Jointly lead an effort to bring a more unified design across multiple design teams and bring accessibility testing into the design process.
Lessons
Learned to work in a fast pace design space with fluctuating user needs and expectations.
Gained a better understanding of the required needs of a dev team that was developing multiple different features.
Expanded my UX Design knowledge both in general and specifically for gaming projects.