The client
This project’s scope was to offer a different activity and stimulus to the users/students of the Estudo Fácil platform (an online platform for fundamental school reinforcement), the client (Estudo fácil) brought the idea that the ideal activity would be an educational game based on storytelling. The game itself should aim to bring a applicability perspective of knowledge to students, through an engaging story and challenges or minigames to complete.
From start to finish, the team and I shared a collaborative vision, and I ensured to include the entire team, from different areas, in every process: from the conception of the game, development of level design, and even more specific things such as some art options and tone of voice/humor.
The challenge
Together with the art team, I structured a user survey to support the choice of art direction; the research should be conducted with children from 11 to 13 years old, who are the users/students of the Estudo Fácil platform. Working with such a young audience was very new for the whole team, which made both the development of the research and the application and interpretation of the results very challenging. From this research, it was possible to pick the style of illustration and hud/UI, and better understand how users interact with screens, which helped in the treatment of user experience in the game.
The process of managing the entire design of such a multidisciplinary project was the most challenging part and that most yielded a rich learning: from discovering and reconciling the needs of the project - mainly because the client gave total autonomy and freedom to us to make all project decisions-, organizing a schedule, figuring and sorting tasks, to monitoring and reviewing the art assets, script and development, all of this in addition to designing the flows and journeys, interactions, UI skeletons and wireframes.
The client, who helped a lot with our research, ended up very happy seeing that the survey results had influenced in the final product - which made me, personally, so proud of the team's work. Advocating that the design process is important and will increase the delivery quality is my main goal when working with clients.