ROLE:  Designer

Platform:  mobile |  Engine:  Unity 4 |  Duration:  10 weeks |  Team:  5

Mineral Monsters is a mobile game aimed towards 4th graders.  In this game, students select a state on a map of the US and are given a mystery mineral.  Students take this mineral back to their virtual lab and perform various tests to determine their properties.  Minerals are then placed in a "Monster Cooker" and students input the properties they have found.  If correct, the mineral is transformed into a powerful fighting monster.

 

My Contributions

Game Design

  • Game flow
  • Types of minerals
  • Monster stats

As the sole designer on this project, I developed the concept pitched by our programmer.  Coming from a background in geology, he often found that mineral samples used in labs were kept for years and would be extremely worn and fragmented.  Some minerals were too expensive to replace often, or even have at all.  So, with Mineral Monsters, we first and foremost wanted to create a prototype where students could have clean virtual samples to practice their identification techniques as much as they want.

 

I designed the basic game loop (above left), as well as the stat breakdowns for all the minerals (above right).

Our basic requirements were to abide by the Sunshine State Standards for geology in 4th grade, teaching the properties of streak, color, cleavage, luster, and hardness, along with the procedures used to test for these properties.  We accomplished this in our lab portion of the game, and wanted to take it further.  We chose 13 minerals and assigned them to a state they are found in, creating the map interface and giving students geographic context.  We also wanted players to do more with the monsters they create, so we implemented the battle phase where monsters spar RPG-style.

Stats for the mineral monsters were derived from real mineral properties.  Speed is a function of photon energy by the mineral's color; defense scales to hardness; attack is the difference between a mineral's streak and its color; HP scales to cleavage, with easier and more imperfect breaks dropping HP; and special attack is by luster type, with mineral refraction giving additional attacks in a row.  These stats were spreadsheet-based with the intention of tweaking with playtesting.

 

Check out the game website here for more information:  http://mineralmonsters.weebly.com/