Role:
Gamification
Category:
Research
Time:
2023
During the master's research period, the third design prototype titled 'Plant-themed App Design Research'. This is an experimental design that integrates game and application design, exploring from the perspective of game design how popular science picture book applications should balance fun and professionalism.
The process of finding and recognizing plants in reality is gamified into an open-world exploration process, combined with interactive tasks with NPCs, attempting to integrate the tedious learning process into a game process, learning and recording plants in the process of task and world exploration.
Design Background
When I returned to the origin of plant cognition education, I found that interest is always the best teacher. With the opportunity of the school's game design workshop, I interviewed many elementary school children about their views on the application. It is their inspiration that prompted me to reconstruct this prototype with a gamified mindset.
Given the existence of specialized tools, I hope to fill the gap in designing for children.
Functional Architecture
Game Play: The core gameplay of this cross-border application includes small-scale open-world exploration, interactive tasks with characters, and collection of key items (plants). The protagonist will record his observations with his props (notebook) during the game process, thus presenting the plant content to the player.
Educational and Fun: Users will encounter task interfaces while exploring the map, which may come from NPC task requests. Through task settings closely related to people's real lives, users will gradually come into contact with various plant-related information that they would not otherwise know without deliberately observing plants in reality.
Design Features
Small-scale Open World: Constructed a 3D island scene using Unity, including four main terrain features, six plant gathering ecosystems, and over twenty plant species.
