Role: Game Design Lead Organisation: Miko.AI
Product: Games that use Human-Robot Interaction Duration: Apr-Aug 2022
game design • product development • interactive storytelling • narrative design
Created two games for the AI-based Kids Companion Robot including (i) Freeze Dance Game and (ii) Hide and Seek Game that were released on the B2C robot in November 2022. They are meant to promote collaboration, movement, and play amongst kids. The games reached 3 million+ children all over the world
The game has been reviewed online in the first segment of the video below:
The unique challenge of building both the games is that these are conventional physical games that are to be rendered for a bot. It was critical that the human nature of unpredictability gets translated in the game flow.
My game design process looks more or like this, with some variations depending on the nature of the project:
The aims for progression level design was to: (i) increase randomness (ii) increase the level of difficulty. Additional features that gamify the entire experience and reward the player for dancing at a high energy were also added. Two separate options for single-player and multiplayer.
To top it off, a cohesive narrative is needed to tie all the loose ends together and have the goals make sense for a child and at the same time incorporate features of playfulness, silliness, and nonsense. I applied the beauty of mathematics to create randomness and used sound and music to communicate the increasing difficulty.
In the Hide and Seek game, the key challenge is to cover up the robot's weakness that facilitates the original gameplay, which is, not being able to look inside opaque objects, not being able to seek in far away places, and trying to make the bot seem as "smart" as possible.
More to come soon. Stay Tuned!
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