BeeYou Games | Mysite

Project Description

I was both the lead designer as well as the project manager for Project "BeeYou", codenamed after our clients; BeeYou Games.

BeeYou wanted us to make a game that would help children developing their social skills in a playful environment.

I've been the only designer on a team of 5 through most of the development process, so I've worked on nearly every part of the design for the game. This project was developed alongside "Energy Eaters", another serious game where I was the main game designer as well.

Gameplay trailer

My Contributions

Game design - Gameplay & mechanics: My main responsibilities for the project laid with designing the gameplay. I focused especially on the game mechanics and the overall experience of the game and each level. I documented everything relating to the game design and the design in general inside the game design document. The document can be found further down.

Main game mechanics
The player: Their controls, abilities & limitations
Exploration: Navigation, narrative, secrets & incentive

Minigames: Connected to abilities as variation in exploration and between dialogue.
Dialogue system: A gamified dialogue system with different choices, based of social skills

Reward system: An experience system that allows the player to obtain new skills which can be used inside and outside dialogue and gives a sense of growth. Opens up new options within the narrative and exploration.

Dialogue system with portraits (Dutch)

Level design: After setting up the mechanics of the game, I set up rules where I could design levels in which would give me a range of the tools I could work with to make fun levels. I carefully considered the story as well in the design process, as the narrative was a big part of the game.

Another big part of the game was that it needed to have a modular level setup, meaning that every game should be able to be played in any given order. The levels needed to be designed with this in mind, meaning no callbacks to the levels the player had already played (which of course had implications for the game design as well) .

I first sketched out a map for every level I worked on (three of the five), made flowcharts for the navigation and afterwards prototyped them out inside Unity with the tools that the programmers made for me.

Narrative design: Considering the narrative, I was mainly in charge looking at the framework of characters that the previous designer* gave me and fit them into NPC quests and scenarios that would be fun to play through while the player could learn something from it. So, the foremost thing I did in terms of narrative design was creating the scenarios within every level, placing the accordingly to create pacing and how it contributes to the overall story in the level.

I did not write the dialogue for the game, given the amount of work during this period **, it was not feasible for me to also write the dialogue for the game, which was taken over by a stand-in after I gave them the narrative outline for the level.

Mushroom map - Level design

Mushroom level - Prototyping

Multiple choices lead to different outcomes

Project manager: As an exercise to become an overall better communicator and to challenge my skills as a designer within a team, I suggested to the team to become its project manager.

It was honestly quite the exhausting task, but one which gave me nonetheless so much valuable experience in terms of the amount of experience I've gained from steering my team for 5 whole months.

There were a lot of hurdles that I had to make solutions for as to keep the development not meeting a standstill and I will admit there was a lot of falling underway. However, it was the experience and new insights I've obtained that made it completely worthwhile, and I hope that I'm able to use this experience in the future to be an even better team member.

*This project started off with another designer on the team that was dedicated to the narrative design and the UI/UX. They sadly had to take their leave from the project due to health issues. I needed to take over the narrative design for the project due to these circumstances.

** Due to me also working simultaneously on another project at this time, I had too much tasks to consider writing the dialogue for the game. This task was handed over to a part-time designer that joined during the last 5 weeks of the project