Thesis research on improving the co-play experience between parents and their children in a Roblox game.
Research conducted in collaboration with Funomena, an award-winning independent game studio.
Want to know more? Read my paper on Springer LNCS.
KTH Supervisor – Prof. Kjetil Falkenberg
KTH Examiner – Prof. Kristina Höök
Funomena Supervisor – Anthony Fudd
The goal of this project was to redesign an existing Roblox game, Funomena’s Magic Beanstalk.
The redesign aimed to improve the game’s co-play experience between parents and their children.
This was accomplished by applying co-play design recommendations to two of Magic Beanstalk’s mini-games.
I designed the new mini-games and implemented them in Roblox in an iterative development process, testing early prototypes with target users and the design experts from Funomena.
Finally, the redesigned mini-games were evaluated by parent-child dyads in a small user study.
This initial evaluation found that the new mini-games engendered a better co-play experience.
Like Balls of Fire, the core gameplay design pattern is Maneuvering.
The player is controlling the avatar’s movement, attempting to avoid obstacles and reach the goal.
In Balls of Fire players chase randomly moving Fire Balls.
In Chicken Chase players chase semi-intelligent chickens instead.
Chicken Chase builds on the simple Maneuvering core and adds:
Asymmetric player abilities and Cooperative gameplay with a high level of dependency.
This is done by introducing two player roles – The Chaser (seen in the gif above) and The Feeder.
The Chaser is extremely quick and thus very good at catching roaming chickens.
The Feeder is much slower and strategic.
Placing chicken feed on the ground to attract the chickens to specific areas.
Like Dance Icon, the core gameplay design pattern is Emoting.
Utilizing Roblox’s Dancing Emotes to connect players through dancing together.
In Dance Icon players perform a dance move according to the random icon displayed to them.
Chicken Chase builds on the simple Dancing Emotes core and adds Co-creation.
In Disco Paint players perform dance moves to color to color a grid of square “Disco Tiles”.
Each dance move colors the tile the player is standing on with a different color.
When dancing together, the players are also drawing together.