As we originally envisaged it, this was going to be about learning to associate a letter with an animal, whilst hearing it pronounced. I later learned that its better to teach children 'puh' is for Platypus, rather than 'pee' is for Platypus, because that's actually how children learn to spell. I learned we should use lower case letters, because children only learn about capitals later on. This posed a bit of a design challenge because my original concept was a circular one, with no descending letters - all caps.
The original idea would have been the most language intensive game amongst all our games, and translating this game would have been the most work. One interesting translation challenge is that in Spanish
Platypus = ornitorrinco.
Thus we would have run into a bit of work when making the Spanish version, as if we move the platypus to display when the user clicks the 'O' we'd have to make sure we have an animal for the 'P'. All of which we could have done, but it seemed to me like maybe we should get clever early on. Additionally, for languages that don't use our alphabet, having a navigation system completely dependent on 26 English letters seemed a trifle problematic.
The other thing that happened was that as I prototyped these screens, what emerged were some consistent positions for the game area and the 'buttons/text' area, and I wanted to see if I could carry these design elements on for this game.
So in effect, when the user clicks a picture, it expands to encompass nine squares, and the top area displays a single word. Perhaps we hear a voice say "Platypus!". This evolution is more about meeting the animals. You can close the big square and go back to choosing animals to meet. The big image is so large that we could include some text on it, or some futher interactivity, without too much problem. The top right hand side arrow sends a whole new set of animals into the main game area to meet.
It would still be possible to have an image of your child in the grid!
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