DATE 2018

ORGANISATION Nexus Interactive Arts

ROLE Game Designer

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Google commissioned Nexus Interactive Arts to create a touchscreen quiz for its stand at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  The brief was to convey brand content to conference attendees during the event, but to do so in an engaging way which encouraged players to retain knowledge about Android brand history.

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Whilst dealing with potentially quite technical corporate content was a challenge, there was certainly scope to introduce appropriate mechanics to encourage knowledge retention and incentivise repeat play.

 

The client was keen to stick to a traditional multiple choice quiz, but I designed a simple score countdown system to encourage play based on reaction time: the longer a player took to give a correct answer, the fewer points they would receive.This allowed for sufficient differences in player performance, even when two players got the same number of questions correct, meaning that we could create a meaningful leaderboard which would encourage players to play again to better their scores, having taken on board correct answers in the process.

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I also designed some simple power ups to assist players who weren’t familiar with the subject matter, which also introduced sufficient variety to play styles to support a small achievement system based on play style - whether players used power ups at all, how quickly the answered, whether they got a lot wrong etc.

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Together, these simple mechanics helped encourage repeat play and information retention, whilst support an engaging art and animation style.