Tyto Ecology & Tyto Online

"Immersed Games is an early stage ed tech startup with an audacious vision
of how games can be used to empower student learning." - Immersed Games

TYTO Ecology - Mobile & PC, Simulation

I joined the Immersed Games team as a game designer on Tyto Ecology in August of 2015.

Tyto Ecology is an ecosystem simulator for mobile and PC. Players are tasked with learning about producers, consumers, and decomposers as they strive to create a balanced and thriving ecosystem in one of many different biome types. The game utilizes the Next Generation Science Standards as its basis for educational content.

As part of the Immersed Games design team, I had a number of contributions to the project, mostly related to user interface/user experience and character control systems. Within the realm of UI/UX, I championed and identified multiple portions of the UI that lacked any type of color association to help identify interactive elements (e.g. "Okay" or "Cancel" buttons not having color associations such as green and red, respectively) and worked with our engineering team to implement those changes into the game.

For the character control system, I was tasked with redesigning the system from the ground up to better fit mobile controls. The biggest changes that needed to be made related to how the player used touch-controls to interact with the camera. Initially, it was handled with cumbersome and confusing multi-touch controls, whereas my design streamlined those controls into simple one-finger gestures or by creating a dedicated UI element instead. Other improvements included finding the initial "default" level of sensitivity for the controls and how tapping on and interacting with objects in the world was handled.

Throughout my time with Immersed Games, we ran several internal and external playtests (external playtests were conducted with local middle-schoolers, in order to ensure the standards and game systems were being appropriately designed for their skill-level). These playtests provided excellent data that helped inform the design contributions noted above.

TYTO Online - PC, Educational MMO

Tyto Ecology was created as a proof of concept of the viability of using a game to teach real-world science standards in order to help secure funding for Immersed Games' more ambitious project, Tyto Online. Tyto Online is an educational MMO that allows players to create their own avatars and explore an alien world as they learn real science standards.

I worked on the project before it was released into Early Access, largely during the pre-production phase. My contributions include helping define the game's hub zone (the Tyto Academy and it's immediate surroundings) and creating prototype quest content.

I used a combination of Blender and Unreal Engine 4 to create the layout of the hub zone. The initial prototype went through several iterations based on internal feedback and critique before ending up, more or less, the way it was when the game launched in Early Access in 2016.

My involvement in quest prototyping involved helping to paper prototype quest flow to determine whether or not the proposed ways of incorporating the scientific method into quest objectives (e.g. forming a hypothesis by dragging key information pieces together to form a full argument.). Many of these initially proposed designs made it into the game.

You can keep up with the game's ongoing development here!