The making of Galactic

For our Mandarin Chinese app, we created a game called Galactic to teach the challenging topic of tones. In Mandarin, a word can take on an entirely different meaning depending on the tone that is used. For example, mā with a high level tone means mother, but mǎ with a falling rising tone means horse. Needless to say, not knowing your tones can lead to plenty of (possibly comical) miscommunication, so we decided to tackle it head-on by creating a new game. Here’s the story about how we built it: 

Figuring out our approach

We started by interviewing oodles of Mandarin language learners. As we quizzed them on their knowledge of tones, we repeatedly saw them aiding themselves by waving their fingers in the air in the direction of the tones (swipe up for rising tone, swipe down for falling tone, etc.). It was a lightbulb moment for the team. We knew right then that a gesture-based game was the perfect way to piggyback off of the kinetic learning aid that we were witnessing in our interviews. 

Paper Prototyping 

Before throwing hours into a digital prototype, we kicked around concepts on paper. This allowed us to explore as many options as we liked very quickly, while being critical about what worked and what didn’t. 

Rough wireframing

After validating as many assumptions as possible using paper prototypes, we zeroed in on the feature set of the game by producing rough wireframes of potential concepts. Our tools of choice are Omnigraffle for wireframing and LiveView for making sure our designs feel right on small mobile devices.

Thematic Exploration

Once we worked out the functionality, it needed to be wrapped into a theme/metaphor.

Galactic went through a few thematic development revisions. It originally lived as a game about samurais and sword swipes. While the idea seemed great on paper, we soon realized that it didn’t fit with the vibe of our other mini games.

We wanted to capture the ideas of exploration and progression. We ended up setting the game in outer space, embracing the notion of interplanetary discovery as our metaphor. Space naturally encompasses the concepts of travel and exploration, and using space as our setting brought a sort of mystique to the game that was easy and exciting to build on.

The biggest challenge was working out how to take the vast coldness of space and humanize it. Planets and constellations became characters for a player to be rewarded with as they progressed through the levels.

Iteration Iteration Iteration

After the guts were fleshed out enough, we worked on tuning the interface and interactions.

Galactic went through a few early interaction struggles. In teaching the tones with shape-based associations, we got stuck when creating a gesture-recognition interaction. It proved both hard to tune and a little complicated for a player to digest in the midst of trying to learn. We ended up simplifying the shape-creating method so as to remove player frustration; this resulted in a more responsive game.

In addition to conducting internal testing, we relentlessly playtested our games with neutral outsiders to get feedback on user experience. Galactic’s shape-capturing mechanism benefited from thorough testing and feedback-driven iteration. We continue to tune our product as it exists, live in the App Store.

Galactic is just the start of a bunch of new games we’re releasing. You can play it by downloading MindSnacks Mandarin for free. We hope you enjoy it!

5 months ago  /  44 notes