Game Creator’s Odyssey : An online course designed like a video game
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Aim of the project
The Game Creators’ Odyssey program comes from a partnership between Concordia University and Ubisoft studio. The program is divided into two courses, Game Design and Level Design. The main feature of this project is that it provides a gamified learning experience where designers can experiment and collaborate on game projects together. The Game Creators’ Odyssey is offered as part of the computer science program at Concordia University and as an onboarding training to all Ubisoft’s employee internationally.
To learn more : Ubisoft and Concordia launch an innovative video game design course for university students around the world
My role
Lead Learning Experience Designer
Skills used in this project
Formulate learning outcomes with Subject Matter Expert
Design content storyboards for textual, visual and interactive elements
Script writing for mission’s content and main story
Coach voice actors for main stories
Design and document game mechanics
Overview of UX and UI design
Implement QA process and conduct quality user testing
Overview Marketing strategy and promotional material
Design System
The main objective of the course is to complete all missions and earn the required number of XPs to get the game design certificate. Players must go through all the theoretical content and create their own game in order to earn XPs.
Objective : What the player want to achieve
Challenge: What prevents the player from achieving the objective
Reward : What the player gets to counter the challenge
Design Process
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Writing and Content Design
Being the lead Learning Experience Designer on this project , I formulated learning outcomes with a plan to evaluate the effectiveness of the program from both the learner and the client needs. In partnership with the Subject Matter Expert, I designed content storyboards that brought together textual, visual and interactive elements for each mission. I worked closely with the development team to integrate all content elements into web format, being both accessible and interactive for our target audience.
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Game Design
The program is based on a gamified learning approach where learners can progress through the course at their own pace (asynchronous). To make it to end of the course and earn their certificate, learners must collect a certain amount of XP and Keys. I designed the difficulty progression throughout the missions, the XP and Keys management system and the leaderboard.
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UX Design
In collaboration with the UI designer, I designed the layout, flow and navigation of the program and mission pages. The program offers a two-level navigation, in HTML for the home pages and with an e-Learning authoring tool for the mission pages and evaluations. The program and mission pages had to be designed in a coherent and fluid way in order to provide a smooth and immersive experience for our users.
Beyond Gaming: How you can use the potential of video games to bring your project to another level
The Game Creator Odyssey’s project was presented by myself and our Subject Matter Expert from Ubisoft at the Serious Play conference in Montreal in 2019.
