Brain Powered Games, or BPG is a collection of Mini Games built to test cognitive functions, primarily for children in Africa infected with Cerebral Malaria. I came into the development of the game by the GEL Lab to Primarily: Fix the UI of the game so that it scales with different screen resolutions, Pitch new potential mini games and make improvements to existing games based on feedback from the Research team.
I had done all of these successfully working with another designer to make sure all UI was scaled.
I pitched multiple new games with at least 1 being definitely considered for implementation by the future developers of the GEL Lab.
Lastly, I had made significant changes to many mini games based on Researcher feedback, including Level Design changes in Nile Safari and Difficulty adjustments in Wacky Animals (details below).
Nile Safari: In this mini game, your goal is to go through a grid of water without going through a space with a hippo hiding in it. Players are given a practice round to figure out the path forward, then have to recreate it with as few of mistakes as possible in the actual round. There was a problem with the level design as many patterns, especially those in the smallest grids would repeat, and I would spend time making sure that they would not repeat. I had worked with the programmers on this to make sure this was right, and play tested extensively so no map was too similar to each other in a row.
Wacky Animals: In Wacky Animals, your goal is to click the animal that you are looking for as it comes up on the scene without clicking any other animal. I had made the decision to modify the game, based on researcher feedback, to add additional challenge into the game by adding animal variants, as pictured. These variants would make the game slightly more challenging as the game moves on, as players would have to remember which exact animal variant they had to select. I worked with artists to get the asset created and implemented it into the game when it was ready.
I had prototyped and pitched many mini-games for BPG. The most popular was Africa Crossing, which was a frogger-like game that would require players to dodge running animals as they get to the other side of a fied. Each animal moved at a different speed, which increased the complexity of the game and would be used to increase the difficulty as different speeds of animal would be included in later levels once it is implemented in the framework of the game.