QLT / Kabongo Designer
Kabongo, née Quantum Learning Technologies, was a startup company specializing in games designed to help young learners recognize letter and sounds, read texts, and comprehend the material. We used tested and proven methods of cognitive psychology to design fun games, helping students grasp difficult conceptgs.
Story Illustration
The budget of a startup didn't allow for licensing reading material. I started at QLT as a contractor illustrating short, article-like stories written by another contractor. I'd meet with the development team to discuss the stories and how we might like to spice them up through the artwork. It was a great bonding exercise, and they made the adjustments needed to have me officially join the team.
Character Design
Later on, we switched from one-off articles to stories invoving the same cast of characters and their interactions. Each page would have one unobtrusive looping animation to create lively scenes. In order to speed up development of each release, I made a library of reuseable assets from which I could pluck things like hand poses or props.
Overworld Menus
Throughout the products that we either created or merely envisioned, we liked to use the familiar visual language of games like Mario to create maps that serve as an area to select activities and mark progress.
Added benefits to this approach is establishing a sense of space, and also finding fun ways to surprise users with hidden interactivity.
Avatar Creator
We worked hard to provide users the ability to customize their experience. Their avatar would be the playable character in many of the games and was also controllable in community spaces. Users could build and decorate a house, invite friends to their neighborhood, then walk around and explore these creative environments
Our lead artist created the animated rig. I populated it with hundreds of assets to choose from, each with 8 different views to support free movement in an isometric view. Hats, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, skin, neckwear, shirt, backpack, pants, and shoes were all separate categories. Working with an engineer, we devised a way for color selection to be completely unrestricted. I manually separated line art from fill colors so the software could choose what outlines would be appropriate for a chosen color.
Flash Games
Our young learner suite of games familiarized preschool children with letter-recognition, phonics, and other reading essentials. I identified a missing component in our parent/teacher reporting, which was familiarity with the input needed to properly evaluate perfomance.
I devised and executed (with a team programmer) two games with no educational content, but could be used to judge skill with keyboard inputs, as well as skill with a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. Success or failure in these activities could help in determining what intervention was necessary on an individual basis.
Concept Sketches
Given the opportunity to reimagine what our product could be, we turned from sports to a micro-scale world inhabited by mischevious little aliens. In these, I've envisioned how these creatures could move around, and what kind of diorama-inspired places they might live.