Introduction: Angle Jungle is an award winning puzzle game built by a team of students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center in 15 weeks for Pennsylvania’s Intermediate Unit 1. Angle Jungle has value to first graders and above, its primary purpose though is as a supplement for 4th to 6th graders learning basic geometry.
Awards: Serious Play 2017 Gold Award Winner, CHI Play 2017 Jury Award Winner, Finalist for 50th Carnegie Mellon University Founders Award
Publications:
- Angle Jungle: An Educational Game About Angles
- Carnegie Mellon News Article
- Angle Jungle Gamasutra Article
Platform: iOS | Time: 15 weeks | Role: Game Designer | Team Size: 4
Design Goal: The goal of the project was to achieve the following transformations in our target demographic:
- Primary Transformation: Build familiarity with the angle by having players solve puzzles that use a mechanic that encodes the numeric and spatial representations of angles
- Secondary Transformations:
- Introduce positive and negative angles
- Introduce clockwise and anticlockwise rotation
- Introduce angles greater than 180 degrees
- Build familiarity with the protractor tool
Design Challenges: We faced a number of design challenges during this project:
- Protractor tool introduction
- Finding an mechanic which made angles essential
- Crafting fun and engaging puzzles
- Crafting additional sources of motivation
My Contributions: As the game designer on the project I took the lead on directing our creative efforts. My efforts helped create a well received, fun, and engaging experience which made a good attempt to achieve our transformational goals. Other areas I made significant contributions in were:
- An ideation process that created the main mechanic of the game
- Crafting and refining transformational/puzzle complexity (game complexity that serves a transformational goal) within the experience
- Design of the motivational elements within the experience
- Conducting and interpreting playtests
Download: Angle Jungle has been released on iOS and can be downloaded here
Development Process: Post
Source Code: GitHub
Presentation: