Children's Education Games
Another Fine Homemade Parachute Page, Crafted With Love
1998 - 2001
During my tenure at Basis Applied Technology, I helped design and program a number of children’s educational titles.
Baby Sitter’s Club 4th Grade was the first professional title I worked on, and while my Director skills were limited to some rollovers and some exitframes at the start of it, by the end of the ten week development time I’d done some database management, score keeping, video integration, and lots of debugging. And slept on a desk for the first time.
Madeline First and Second Grade Math followed, for which we used the client’s proprietary game engine for the first time; while the bulk of the programming team was learning that tool, I prototyped the whole shebang in Director. These prototypes allowed us to test game logic, integrate artwork, and post it all as a series of Shockwaves for the client to see and approve. The prototype was also our safety net; in case serious problems evolved, we had a parallel build which had most of the features of the final.
Little Bear’s Preschool and Kindergarten Thinking Adventures presented a new challenge, with the youngest target audience we’d worked for yet. Each aspect of the interface and functional design had to be considered for three- and four-year-olds, and their basic computer skills.
Pokémon presented a new set of challenges, as it not only had a seemingly endless approval chain, but a late change in the marketing emphasis switched the priorities on this two-stage product, so the backburning items where quickly moved to the forefront of development. We also had to train a whole team of programmers who had never worked in Director before, and in addition to writing design documents, figuring out workflows, and coming up with general (and sometimes very specific) technical solutions, this in-house education fell largely to me.
Other projects included work for Disney Interactive, Electronic Arts, and Warner Bros.
