The Good Dinosaur

UX Making touchscreen platformer work for 4-7 year olds.

The Good Dinosaur is a fun life science platformer game about collecting as many resources items as you can before the day ends. The items you collect can be anything in the environment so everything is fair game, from inanimate objects to mammals. You pile them as high as you can and continue to do so while avoiding hazards, which can knock your precious collection away. 

The Problem:

Making a platforming game that spans the age range 4-7 year olds on a touchscreen is not an easy task. We haven't played or seen many games that have done it right for that age group. The design of the controls, level design, and overall difficulty rarely accommodates the youngest and oldest player at the same. The problem to solve is how do you make a game where young players with less refined motor skills and older players with more refined motor skills can enjoy and be engaged at the same time? 

We'll take a look on how we solved this problem by focusing on:

1. Breaking the traditional platforming rules

2. Level Design

3. and Controls

Breaking The Golden Rule:

In traditional platformers like Super Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong the player's ability to control the in game character's movement is the most important mechanic to get right. A platformer's main challenge is to test the player's ability to overcome jumping obstacles that involves tricky timing elements and pixel perfect landing using the player's motor skills. Usually the control goes as follows in a 2d platformer: the player presses the jump button, then presses a direction she wants to go, and then controls the trajectory by either continuing or discontinuing in the direction to land in the desired area. We take that rule and completely break it in The Good Dinosaur to be able to make it work for our age demographic, 4-7 year olds, but before we can do this we have to understand why we can. 

We thought about what and how we can make the game fun if it's not the laser precision platforming challenges. What can it be? Collection! Lot's of collecting! The jumping is secondary or tertiary for the element that creates "fun". It's still important and still there to engage the players between collecting moments. Controlling the jumping has been demoted in its role of "fun ambassador" in the traditional sense. 

Now that jumping has a reduced role we can now break how it is traditionally supposed to behave in platformers. To accommodate the different motor skills in our demographic we made the jump auto translate forward. Yes, that's right we're taking most of the control away from our players. Yikes! Trust me it works, lots of kid testing sessions and tears (from me) confirms it!

Originally we thought that we should give full precise controls to the player but the youngest and even some of the oldest players can't handle it. There were a few set ups that we started with copying tried and true mechanics of a traditional platformer. It was various versions of giving the player full control. The character would jump at any location the player swiped towards on the screen, and if the player held onto the screens position longer after the swipe the further the character would travel in that direction. This is equivalent to continuing to press the left or right on the d-pad or analog stick. Kids could not get this sequence of action. The problem was players never held on so they never moved forward or backwards or any direction, so we had to automated it for them and standardized height and length of the jump. By automating the forward movement action for them they were able to move and explore around the world easily and focus on collecting each and everything in the level rather than precision jumping and metrics. Jumping became a fun thing for the players to do when we implemented this way.

Level Design:

Since we took the controls of the forward translation jump, height and length out the player's hands, we accommodated this with level design that allowed the player to jump around in a fun and easy manner. We tweaked jump metric distance and height and made the levels work with these numbers. As seen in the level image above you can see the platforms laid out with areas asking the player to zig-zag back and forth to get up top, acting like stairs. This allowed the moment-to-moment play be interesting and engaging allowing us to replace many of skill jumps to simple jumping over fall gaps. Whenever we had gaps in the level we usually had them protected where the player can recovery quickly and still offer a good amount of challenge.  By doing this the player's only concern now is to focus on how to get to a certain area to collect things instead of having to focus on fine controls skills to land in a specific spots which would be too overwhelming. 

Controlling the Hot "Spots"

We've done many testing on control inputs. We've tested numerous ways on how to map it on to the screen and asking questions like: Where should the player tap, touch, and where would those hotspots be? What we finally ended with was an option that allow the player to tap on regions rather than lock them to a specific spots on the screen. It was dynamic, we used the character as the reference point. Player needed to only guide the player in the direction they wanted to go by tapping and holding any region in the general direction to guide the character. And if the player wanted to make the character jump then swiping up anywhere onscreen would work: left, right or straight up. One other thing that we found out during testing is the kids wanted to manipulate the character directly and by having this method it allowed the player to touch the character and move him in the general direction they wanted to go. e.g. tap the character then slide to the left or right of him to move. It didn't matter where the start point was only the end point did. 

Summary

Working on The Good Dinosaur was lots of fun especially figuring what worked and didn't work on touchscreen platformers for this demographic. Limiting the amount of thought and mechanical demands from the player is the best way we found out to make it work. By altering and refocusing on what defined the "main" fun of the game is it then allowed me to break the traditional rules of platforming fun. We accommodated this by supporting it with clever level design that took full advantage of an auto-translated jump and additionally made the controls do what the player intends in a simple way. Focus on the goal of the product and the user and you can break the rules to make it happen. When these changes were made for the next round of user testing, we had a 95% success rate of users being able to finish the levels we were testing. Kids were more interested in seeing what else the game had to offer and wanted to play more after the testing session.

Good Dinosaur
Curriculum: Life Science
Demographic: Age 4-7
Platform: LeapPad Platinum