BREAKAWAY was created at the Champlain College Emergent Media Center and uses a narrative based around soccer gameplay to teach children about violence against women. It was originally built in the early 2000s, and the narrative in particular received acclaim for its execution of the Sabido Methodology.
Role: System Designer
Tools: Unity
Platform: Android and iOS
Dates Worked: Jan-Aug 2016/Jan-May 2017
During my time at the Emergent Media Center, I was tasked with adapting the game onto a mobile platform. I prototyped three designs for the soccer gameplay: the handling, shooting, and defending minigames.
Handling
During handling, the player uses quick swipes to maneuver around various enemies on the soccer field. The player moves constantly forward, and can swipe left or right to switch between three lanes. Enemies might slowly track players’ horizontal position, or slide tackle when they got close, requiring players to both plan out their path and react to sudden threats.
Shooting
In the shooting minigame, players had to hit each of the targets in the goal before their time ran out, while avoiding the goalie. The speed and angle of the player’s swipe determined the force and direction of the shot.
Initial designs gave the player three tries to hit one target. Testers were taking a long time to set up and plan their shots, so I switched it unlimited shots with a timer in order to speed the game along and engage the actual time pressure of shooting in soccer.
Defending
The defending minigame required players to wait for the player with the ball to get close, then quickly swipe along a path that would appear on screen to intercept them. The intercepting path could appear anywhere and at any angle, depending on where the opposing player moved.
Postmortem
The prototypes I created before these used gyroscope controls to steer the soccer player through the various minigames. While it was a lot of fun to experiment with the mobile device’s capacity for motion, I quickly realized that this control scheme had an extremely steep learning curve and was more of a hindrance to player engagement than the quick and intuitive interface this game needed. Moving to simpler swipe and drag controls ultimately allowed for more complex enemy behavior, allowing the player to think like an actual soccer player.