BeePopulate
Mobile game on iOS and Android to celebrate Earth Day 2017.
This in-house project was to create a mobile game to celebrate Earth Day in conjunction with pushing environmental awareness of the declining honey bee population around the world. This game was geared towards children to help educate the importance of honey bees both on a local and global scale.
BeePopulate is available on iOS and Google Play app stores.
Discover & Research
We conducted a period of research which included comparative and competitive market research across children, educational and simulator games. We focused on the interaction and behavioral expectations from our potential users as we’ve learned that a game that is more engaging, will in turn, allow our users to learn more as we wanted to put education first and foremost.
Analyze
Our research allowed us to not only define our game type but also helped define our target age demographic. Having come to this conclusion, we solidified that our target demographic would be children and catered the game as such to allow a fun, safe and over all, educational gameplay experience.
The consensus of our research showcasing the drastic decline in bee populations.
Design
From our research, we decided to go with a “playground” approach, which would allow the user to find enjoyment in building and creating a garden to thus attract different types of bees. Depending on the flowers and the arrangement of those flowers, the garden would attract different types of bees which are scientifically accurate to once again push environmental education.
A user flow showcasing the on-boarding user experience of a first time user. This insured that all required functionality was setup and taught to allow smoother subsequent gameplay sessions.
A combination of a wireframe and a userflow of the education “EncycloBEEdia".”
Deliver
A month before the deadline, we started to realize that the user needed a way to generate pollen (the game’s in-game currency which is used to buy new flowers and expand your garden) while in game. Knowing that bees “dance” to communicate with one another, I created DANCE, which is was inspired by rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution/Stepmania. This mini game allowed the user to match the arrows on screens with a simple UI to which after playing allowed the user to generate on-demand pollen to allow more in-game progression.
BeePopulate can be found in iOS and Google Play app stores or visit the website for more information, www.beepopulate.com.
