Heroic Game Day
Heroic Game Day is a kids educational MMORPG that strives to teach the top 20 Life Skills, including entrepreneurship, digital safety, finances, and more. The game puts the player as a hero-in-training at a school for superheroes.
My role was as lead producer, designer, and interim art director.
Characters
I was the lead designer on the main hero characters. The aim was for each hero to embody one of the 20 life skills, such as Gold Angel, the master of Entrepreneurship. My concept for her came from the idea of an “angel investor.”
Below is an animated video introduction of each character that I directed and produced:
Crafting System
I chose for the base crafting ingredients to be hero-specific. For example, Chanchito (Leadership) is a wrestler, so his crafting ingredients were wrestling mats. This connects the players to the characters much more, and makes it very clear which areas and missions (quests in our parlance) the player is likely to find these ingredients.
Sky Base
The Sky Base feature allows players to collect/craft items to decorate their own personal island. I decided to use the default camera and controls to place items due to technical limitations and so that young users would not have to juggle between different controls and camera views.
Players can invite others to their island, as well as use their own personal farm plot.
Heroic Skills Journey
Players tracked the leveling up of their various life skills through their Heroic Skills Journey. Each hero/skill had its own level-up progression, which also adds to their cumulutive Hero Level.
High value blueprints for crafting were rewarded for leveling up a skill level.
Campus Raids
Campus Raids is a PvP team-based game where the Raiding team must capture as many raid points in a 4 minute time limit while the defending team tries to defend and recapture raid points.
Players are grouped into Campuses/schools, so when a school is raided, participants of both schools are given an alert to join. We added a bot system for the defending team so that if no human defenders joined a raid, the raiding team would still have competition.
I designed the gameplay as well as the arena. The arena’s design includes themed rooms for each capture point. This was done to help with performance on Chromebooks, as well as given each capture area a memorable look/feel.
Missions (Quests)
Match 3 Game
The player is taught about the nutrients required to make strong, effective soil. The player must match the required amount of each nutrient.
Investing Game
The player is taught the benefits and risks of investing by jumping on various investment platforms to collect money. Each platform has an oscillating laser that will take their money if it hits the player.
Hardware Game
Player’s are taught about the various types of hardware in computers by selecting the correct piece of hardware and shooting it like a basketball into a moving hoop. The game uses an analogy of body parts to describe the types of hardware.
First Time User Experience Tutorial
I wrote and designed the first time user experience tutorial used to teach players the base controls and features of the game.
Events
Winter Wonderland Event
This single player mission was meant to introduce our open-world holiday level, Winter Wonderland. The aim was to use the experience to teach the player the geography of the environment and send a positive message about holiday cheer. Written and designed by me.
Flyby Canyon Event
This event mission followed the release of the Flyby Canyon environment. This environment was created to compliment our Distraction Management hero, Bullseye Bot. The environment was filled with flying ships that the player had to shoot down, however, there were also new enemies called Boombots which sent out distracting shock waves that would lock the players movement.
The single player mission was released later as a way to put an end cap to the narrative in the environment. Written and designed by me.