BUSY BEES
Busy Bees is an educational gardening game meant to teach Elementary School-aged kids about bees and being biodiverse in home gardens. The focus on the game is to be accessible, engaging, and educational. We wanted Busy Bees to be a short fun experience that could convey just the right amount of information for the age group in just the right amount of play time.
Busy Bees
DESCRIPTION
The game was a four-week project created by a small group. This was an assignment for our second-year game production class. This concept was made under the prompt of making a game that represented an underprivileged or under-recognized group, with the intention of teaching young children about said groups. We decided to teach about bees since they are disappearing due to a series of environmental problems caused by humans. Our goal was to create a piece that would educate the younger generation and hopefully create a brighter more knowledgeable future.
Roles
For this game, I worked in a lot of different roles to make sure this game was accessible, interactive, engaging, and educational. I worked on sound design, dialogue writing, system design, and accessibility design. We wanted this game to have a lot of polish so most of my work had to be focused on incorporating as much feedback as possible while also researching and interviewing to make sure that our gameplay was scientifically accurate, as well as something that would be useful for kids to experience.
SCORING
Since the game is meant for kids, we wanted to make sure that when played was able to give a lot of positive feedback for the player. However, we needed to give the player an idea of how well they were doing so that a lesson could be learned from gameplay, while also avoiding making the kids feel like they had failed. So our scoring system works to give the player high scores as long as they plant flowers, with slight variation from good to excellent depending on how well they did. For example planting a flower might give 10 points, but then planting another flower of the same type near it would subtract one or two points. This allows the player to only achieve an excellent score if they are planting diverse flower groups.
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ACCESSIBILITY
As a learning implement meant for classrooms it was essential that we aim towards all kids no matter their circumstances being able to play this game. The main element we implemented towards accessibility was the dialogue features. A lot of the learning is done through the “Queen Bee” or narrator talking to you. So we made sure dialogue could be read, as well as listened to help any student that might be visually or hearing impaired. In this process I wrote all of the dialogue lines, as well as sought out a voice actor and helped them through recording the lines. Aside from audio and visual accessibility features, we had many more planned and prototyped that I will talk about in the reflection.
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FEEDBACK
We wanted the game to have friendly audible and visual feedback to keep the players interested. So when implementing the sound design we made the choice to keep the instances of sound effects fairly few so as to avoid audio clutter and focus on the sound effects we do include being fun and meaningful. I included a slight popping sound when the bees entered the home, to create a satisfying moment when you manage to do well and attract many bees to the garden. There is then a slight jingle as you grow a plant to signal a job well done. There are a few other gentle sounds placed throughout the game, but always spread onto aspects of the game that wouldn’t overlap each other to keep the audio from getting loud or intense.
For visual feedback we included effects to emphasize the players success when they did well, including large bold works to display how the player did gardening for that round. As well as when the level ends, the more diverse the player makes ther garden, the more bees appear and fly into the bee home, culminating in a number of bees the player saved at the end.
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EDUCATION
It was important that this game be scientifically sound, as well as educationally relevant for the age group experiencing the content. I spent a lot of time researching bees, the problems they face, their likes and dislikes, but my team and I also looked into the curriculum of certain elementary school grades to see how we could tune the information we put in front of the player to be relevant. The player has two main ways of learning from this game. First are the “bee facts,” which are a series of facts spoken by the “Queen Bee” either when you click on her, between rounds, or when you select flowers to inform the player about plants, gardening, bees, and other relevant information. This is intended to convey straightforward information to the player, and support the lesson that can be learned through gameplay. The second way to learn is through gameplay and scoring. The scoring system and game feedback is built around the player getting higher and better scores by making their garden more diverse. Our goal is that the player will be able to learn this lesson through gameplay. However in case it wasn’t clear or depending on if a younger age group is playing the game, we included the bee facts to convey that lesson and other information.
REFLECTION
Busy Bees was one of my favorite projects to work on. Our team was cohesive and we were all enthusiastic about the project, as well as diligent in our work to complete it. The game has a significant amount of polish with great visuals, dialogue lines, feedback, and a lack of bugs. However our greatest enemy with this game was a lack of time. We put a lot into the game but one of our core pillars at the beginning of the project was to make it as accessible as possible. We planned out different control schemes to help people that may be physically impaired, and we did a lot of research into color blind settings to implement. However, in the end we made the decision to cut those features. We wanted to polish the core gameplay loop as much as possible and there was no time to officially implement the new accessibility features.
We included a lot of information into this game about bees, and the environment, and we did well at presenting it in a way that makes sense, and should not be too overwhelming for the age group. Although, looking back we did not have the ability to test the game with the actual intended audience, which is a huge blow to the game's credibility. We don’t know whether or not the information will be carried out correctly to the audience, or if the gameplay is engaging enough to keep someone hooked. We could only make an educated guess based on our research.
Overall, with our 4 week time frame, we managed to accomplish a lot with this game. I have no real regrets about the content of the game and it has a level of polish that I felt good about. I only wish we had the time to implement more accessibility, and get it some proper testing so that we could really know if we had accomplished our goal of creating a proper educational game.
Team Members
Sarah Shaw(Artist)
Matthew Lovetere(Designer)
Gavin Lechner(UI/Systems Programmer)
Evan Koppers(Gameplay Programmer)