Postmortem of an Educational iPhone Game for Kids

Frogs and Fireflies screenshot

Children’s games are my specialty, and I considered this a lucky thing when I browsed the App Store.  As a 2.5 year old girl with an iPad made it well known this week, kids love touch screens. 

And browsing YouTube and the blogosphere, or even just looking around the waiting area of any busy restaurant, you will see many parents aren't shy about letting their kids use their iPhones.  Heck, some young kids even have their own iPod Touches!

Games account for a large chunk of app sales, so where were all the games for kids?  Browsing the App Store, I saw lots of apps for kids, but not very many games. 

Some apps were calling themselves games, but the lion’s share of kid-directed apps were really just interactive worksheets, quizzes, or flash cards.  Where were all the games for kids?  I decided to make one.

I knew from watching two and three year olds play with the iPhone that they sometimes liked to press the screen, as opposed to tapping or lightly touching.  They also had a problem target touching small items, like entries on a standard sized menu.  They needed a screen that was clutter-free because they tend to touch things accidentally. 

The 2.5 year old girl with the iPad demonstrates this well.  I got to thinking young kids might enjoy paint mixing, and it would suit their motor skills.  But what game mechanic could I do with blobs of paint?  I wasn’t sure.  A few days later, the weather was getting warmer, and the fireflies came out in New York City.  Who doesn’t love fireflies?  It wasn’t long before I merged the paint mixing and firefly concepts.

Every game needs a goal, and who loves flies more than a frog?  My game concept idea was born.  But I was just a lone designer with an idea.  How did I get the game made?  There’s more about the production process on my personal blog.  This is a post-mortem, so I’m here to talk about what went wrong, and what I learned.

+ Just because your UI is simple enough for a 3 year old doesn’t mean they’ll be able to play your game.  In testing a beta with my target age group, I quickly discovered that color mixing isn’t a concept one learns about until kindergarten or first grade. 

In fact, some people never learn about it!  I met more than one adult who didn’t know the first thing about color mixing, and this made it very difficult for them to play.  The result was I decided to recommend the game for ages 5 and up, instead of ages 3 and up.  It was disappointing to not be able to serve the three and four year olds out there.

+ Instructions aren’t necessarily a bad thing.  Text in games is a pet peeve of mine.  Games with a plot and dialogue need it for certain, but in casual games, it’s often a barrier to play.  So I thought I wanted to keep it out of my game.  I decided to go with a dialogue-free, text-free animated demo that was only 5 seconds. 

I thought if the player saw an example of the action that needs to occur, he would know what to do.  Play testing revealed that I was wrong.  A good 80% of people that played my game for the first time, kids and adults alike, watched the animation and still had no idea what to do.  In the end, I decided to go with instructional slides with illustrations and text, as many iPhone games use.  I think it’s become so common, it’s what people expect. 

In play testing those, I saw more people go to the instruction screens and read them than I had seen people who understood what the animation was trying to tell them.  My original intuition that most people just hit ‘Play’ without first reading the instructions was false.  

+ Difficulty adjustment is tough!  This is no secret among game designers.  But designing for ages 5 to adult is especially tricky.  For launch, we went with a game that kids could play and not get too discouraged by.  We’re already thinking of ways to retool the game to challenge more skilled players while still letting young ones enjoy it.  It would be easy to just leave it as a kids game, but it has shown too much appeal among adult players to ignore this larger potential audience.

[Frogs and Fireflies is currently available on the App Store.]