BPG: Africa Village Builder is an orthographic, 2D game where you manage a village by gathering resources and building new buildings. It has been in ongoing development for multiple years, and it is used in parts of Africa to teach young children important life skills like resource management, teamwork, and more. Specifically, this game helps with Malaria and HIV-related neurocognitive deficits. It is played primarily on iPads, though it is also functional on Mac and Windows.
This was the first project I began working on at the Michigan State University GEL Lab (Games for Entertainment and Learning). This was a pre-existing project that was being added to as new feature concepts arose. I worked with a team of ten people to create new systems and integrate them into the pre-existing game.
The largest addition we made to the game was incorporating a hierarchy of needs into the systems in place. I added notifications for the player to see when they needed to perform certain actions. I also added extra information into a few systems to provide the player more understandable feedback. Further, I worked with the designers on the structure we decided to use for our hierarchy of needs, including adding new buildings into the game and limiting the player's responsibilities depending on their level.
For more information about this ongoing project, visit here.