BPG Africa

Brain Powered Games - Africa

Role(s): Programmer, Technical Designer
Genre: Educational collection of mini-games
Platform: Mobile (iPad)
Development Time: 11 months, launched March 2020
Team Size: 8
Engine: Unity
Awards/Accolades: Currently in-use through MSU research in Africa

Brain Powered Games - Africa is a package of "brain training" mini-games that is used in a psychological research study through Michigan State University. The study aims to use the games to improve the cognitive abilities of children in Africa who have suffered brain damage as a result of HIV or malaria. The games are being developed by the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at MSU.

All of the mini-games were originally created around 10 years ago by the GEL Lab. I was brought onto the team in order to recreate those games from the ground up to be ported to the iOS platform. Our team was also tasked with creating a new game entirely to be added to the collection upon completion. Called Village Builder, it is a city-builder, real time strategy game aimed at challenging more of the higher-order, executive functions of the children such as reasoning, decision making, and planning.

I have been on the project since its inception in May 2019. In September 2019, I had the opportunity to travel to Uganda to pilot test the games in the research environment. A full description of my contributions can be found below.

Contributions

Developed a matching card game, GoNoGo task, and maze memorization game as part of the games package
Implemented a short mini-game at the start of the sequence of games aimed at teaching users with little exposure to tablets how to use a touch screen
Designed and developed generic systems to be abstracted across several of the mini-games in order to make the development of the holistic package a more efficient process
Developed the "hazard" system for Village Builder, a city-builder game included in the package, that threatens to destroy parts of the player's village in order to promote executive functions like reasoning and planning

Memory matching game

An early version of Village Builder

Implemented UI for the objective system in Village Builder in a such a way as to avoid language barriers
Worked closely with a team of researchers while in Kampala, Uganda to train them on gameplay procedures
Spent a week and a half working in the Mulago hospital in Kampala to rapidly iterate on feedback from pilot testing with some of the local children
Collaborated with the team of Ugandan researchers while in Kampala in order to incorporate their cultural knowledge into the design of Village Builder

Takeaways

Porting an existing codebase into a new, "remastered" version
Communicating effectively with a very diverse team
Developing an experience for a client
Designing object-oriented systems that speed up development time
Designing gameplay systems with a target audience in mind

Myself and the team in Uganda