Design Talk

I wanted to take some time to talk about some of the design decisions that were important to in making this project. I’m not a formally educated educator, nor do I have any formal training in child or gaming psychology, but I have been following the news, and I am a mother myself, so I have made some very conscious choices in how the reward system plays out in Runi’s Math Castle.

Unlockables - First is the choice to have bonus content (skins and mini-games) be purchasable instead of randomly rewarded. Given the connection between loot-boxes and gambling addictions, I decided against any kind of random reward system. Also, letting the player choose what to unlock with the rewards increases agency.

Math Questions - Every math question is structured with 5 possible answers. The starting reward value is 3 stars. Each wrong guess reduces the number of stars the correct answer is worth. Three wrong guesses and the correct answer is revealed, awarding no stars. I’ve seen my kid play games that let her keep answering until she gets it right, and that leads to her “button mashing” until she’s rewarded, which is not the thoughtful experience I wanted to create here.

Reveal Reward - The kid play testers figured out quickly that answering the question correctly the first time got them more stars, which encouraged them to solve the problem correctly. The stars are hidden until earned so that wrong answers don’t cause a star to go away and unnecessarily dissuade the player.

Number Range - The original goal was to let older kids turn up the difficulty by growing the number range past the initial 0 - 10 and including negatives when they are ready. What I wasn’t expecting was for younger kids to turn the number range up very high and just go crazy seeing the very large numbers in the math problems. Happy side effects.

Encouraging Daily Practice - Rather than work in some fomo gimmick for a daily login bonus, I incorporated score boards. Scores for Math problems and mini-games get tracked each day encouraging players to try and beat their best whenever they can come play.

• caio Nicole