In this 2014 GDC Next panel presentation, ChoreMonster's Paul Armstrong and Alex Bowman, Ubooly's Carly Gloge, and THUP Games's Jim Nichols explain how to design useful, entertaining games and apps for children (and also not just for children).

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1.Build a brand
- A parent will look for something they recognise like an Elmo or Disney character.  They're also looking for something that isn't necessarily the stock standard mainstream, but familiarity helps.
2.Build a reputation
Often when parents browse apps they have an idea of what they're looking for, but they're actually looking for something that they've seen a kid play or heard about from another parent, something that’s been reviewed well.  
3.Features
Parents like applications to be both fun and educational (noting that this is all too often a check-box for apps, without real substance), as well as age-appropriate
4.Price carefully
Potential hidden payments send off alarm bells.  Parents prefer the full offering upfront.  This is tricky because you may need to release a freemium LITE version to build brand awareness, but you need to do a lot of research into the kinds of features people will pay for.
 
MISTAKES
Inconsistency…
e.g. following the Monkey preschool lunchbox app with a dress-up app…
it was really cute and had a lot of fun things for kids to do, but the parents didn't like it in general, because it was sort of a violation of the contract we had started with lunchbox, it wasn't educational, too much of a change too soon. The kids really liked it. But parents didn't – particularly not when they had the choice between a more overtly educational app versus one that was simply about play.
 
Insufficient observation…
During the first six months, we only watched children playing with our app once a month. Initially only a couple people would observe, but it became clear that developers were only loosely interpreting the results. When the entire team started watching the actual footage on a regular, fortnightly basis we found that they took it to heart when they saw something not work and would go fix it. This made our whole path a lot clearer.
 
Pricing…
Initially we thought we would offer subscriptions beside a limited free service, but we over-valued our offering.  We thought the limited service would inspire kids to ask for subscription. As it turned out parents got annoyed that we did not give their kids a good experience. We made assumptions without doing a lot of research. Again, we were just four people or three people, just working on small surveys that weren’t well rounded enough.
 
I've heard so many app developers say, Oh, we did a survey and people said they'd spend $6 a month on this…but I rarely ever see that play out. You need to look at the landscape of what people are willing to pay out there.  If you're in a marketplace, where everyone's offering it for free, you're not going to have any luck trying to offer it for a pay.  People generally won’t pay very much for children’s apps. … And BTW, often it turns out that main revenue generators (the people buying in-app purchases) are actually older audiences - which is a design challenge if you're making a children's app.

You're competing with a lot of like toy companies now and for them it's all about brand awareness. They're hoping that the kids will engage with the apps, they don't need to make any money on it. So you have to have a different strategy.
 
Originally, we sold coins for use in the app. It was actually Apple that pushed us away from that. They don't like the idea of kids kind of being consumers in games. So then we changed it, where now we sell educational packs to parents, and our conversion rate went from 2% to  8%.
 
Testing tips
- Don’t facilitate the play sessions – just watch how the kids engage with it through their own initiative. Don’t step in and touch the screen for the kid.
- You need someone to go in there that doesn't really have a lot of knowledge. Sometimes it's a parent, sometimes it's a play therapist that can help kids feel comfortable and won’t step in unless the kids were like really frustrated. If the parent is around, they're going to be protective, but that may also be realistic.
- If your app will be used at home, that's where you test.
- Rather than hire external research companies, it is generally better for the team to get in front of kids and watch them engage with the app.  Creators can’t rely on their own expectations, or intuitions as audiences often surprise creators.
 
 
How have audiences surprised you?
-I didn’t realise how much people hate reading…they skip over everything that explains how the app works …(so now) we keep it to one sentence…and keep everything flying through.
-I didn’t realise how protective a parent would be e.g. some parents refused to allow rewards in the app...educating them on the value of that reward became essential, like what the point values mean and how players gain points. There are so many things that we need to get across to a parent, but people are busy. (To counteract this these creators added a commanding voice-over at the start, followed by a fun and engaging question).
-At the same time children don't like to just sit around and wait to have something explained, so you have to design for the mechanics and play to be sort of obvious or intuitive for them.

How to be educational and entertaining, with creative pricing models.
 
-For school age children educational aspects are best kept optional and playful
 
-Education is already a kind of game-play for pre-school children so that can become core game design.
 
Design tips...
- Children often want to see things that look like they were drawn by a kid.
- Children will just touch and be like, oh, it does this. Do all you can to reward that.
- Children may also not have a lot of life experience, but they don’t like to experience themselves as being limited. They have an ego and they want to do things and so when they want to move into your game their expectation is that they're going to be able to do well in it and maybe they'll learn something for from it.
- So you always need to have hooks that allow them to move and be empowered and be able to experience the game. They can get stuck but the solution can reference back to something that might have already happened earlier in the game.

Design mistakes…
- Overly abstract or complex interfaces or interfaces that are just really complicated
- Over offering the core gameplay, like adding a bunch of bells and whistles that don't really have to do with the main experience so they become distracting.
- Remember, children like primary colours.  They can’t see the whole rainbow…so the tradition that everything has to be glossy and bevelled and shadowed and noise is not helpful in this context.  Neither are gimmicky fonts and typefaces.

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Future opportunities…
- Products that are integrated into a kid's life in a more organic way – to offset screen time, but also heighten the benefits of connectivity…something that has a lot of the sort of same sort of stickiness that TV used to have.
- Apps that graduate with kids… growing up with them and and kind of staying with them, so there’s brand allegiance and a lot of physical products.
- Engaging grandparents and extended family members. 40% of our customers were grandparents.  Grandparents are tech savvy, and they know their grandchildren are already playing with mobile devices.  They just don't know how to engage. So if you can create an opportunity, I think there's some interesting things you can do there.
- Channels…a bit like what's happening with Netflix, these channel opportunities offer a more holistic approach. Something's going to have to eventually break in with the individual app purchase world.

Armstrong, Paul, Alex Bowman, Carly Gloge, and Jim Nichols. 2014. DESIGNING APPS AND GAMES FOR KIDS (THE RIGHT WAY). edited by GDC. U.S.: YouTube.

Another gem from the Game Developer Conference vault.  In this 2017 session, escape room designer Laura E. Hall discusses the design fundamentals and structures necessary for creating real-world experiences that offer not only entertainment, but also create immersion and transport players into heightened fictional experiences. 

VR has the potential to combine both physical and virtual worlds.  It does this by creating a new language that takes into account the physical body, cognitive processes of the brain and design that accounts for human subconscious.

To help ground players in the activity you need puzzles that match player ability and also make sense according to fiction being presented.

Puzzle solving is an exercise in observation and evaluation
e.g. The need to identify and decipher morse code (waves and dots) hidden in stamp postage marks (with no context, or illustration).
Such a puzzle could be made slightly easier by grouping the stamps, or placing them in a particular order.
But, you need to know your audience – Gamers who solve puzzles might expect to find morse code, but would people off the street be able to make that leap?

e.g. A puzzle room for a group of people who didn’t know what the corporate event involved…
Hall tried to balance skills by posing a range of puzzles
To make those accessible/easy puzzles more fun she introduced a speed run challenge, rather than a ticking clock.
She also gave contextual clues to make the puzzles accessible – e.g. showing some letters to reveal enough of a word that players could guess the rest.

CAUTIONARY NOTE –
-When people are focused and having fun in virtual worlds they may lose their awareness of time and play beyond their own physical capacity.
You may need trained, aware helpers to ensure that participants are protected from this propensity
In her games, Hall often has a hint screen that blares loudly whenever a new hint is broadcast – often the screen has to blare out a few times before it gains the players' attention nevertheless.
-Brain fatigue is also a real issue. 
Furthermore, players are also less inclined to suspend disbelief in real spaces, than in a theatre

People really don’t need a lot of props for a VR world to be real for them 
e.g.
There’s a Nicole Kidman film called Dogville where it’s set on a stage where the houses are indicated by outlines that are taped out.
So you don’t need hyper-realism…it’s possible to reduce the cognitive load and speaking to the subconscious instead.

Design a cohesive world with a complicated backstory that informs the design
-Hall makes sure all puzzles are moving forward to create a sense of progression
-Also designs character interactions to change the game state in a specific way, often with minimal dialogue (b/c people remember how they felt, not words they’ve read…in that flow state efficiency of info becomes really important….reduced dialogue to 1 line every 15 mins, only about 200 written or spoken words in total).

Here is an example puzzle room experience where each step of the story your goals change, you learn more about the world and the stakes are raised. 
- When you 1st get into the room you know you’re investigating a character who’s gone missing. 
- Your 1st task unlocks an audio recording locked in their desk which teaches about their paranoa, the world
- Next you change the security level clearance on a keycard that you send to a prearranged hiding spot indicated on that recording which alerts the character to your presence.
- They send back a hand-written note asking for your help, along with the typewriter (teaches you about technology, encoding, spycraft)
- That puzzle gives you access to a security system that you use to trace a guard’s path through the space.
- Entering the solution sends the path to the character that you’re helping who uses that info to sneak out and avoid the guard.
- You watch as this is happening on a silent screen
- But then at that point the character betrays you – they’re going to get out but you’re on your own.
- They tell you via a recording that they’ve left a magnetic pulse device hidden in their office so now it’s up to you to activate it to escape the building and get out.

Hall, Laura. 2017. LESSONS FROM ESCAPE ROOMS: DESIGNING FOR THE REAL WORLD AND VR. In GDC Vault. U.S.: Game Developer Conference.

At the 2016 Game Developer's Conference Rob Morgan who co-wrote J.K. Rowling's Platinum-selling Augmented Reality PS3 title 'Wonderbook: Book of Spells' and its sequel 'Book of Potions' shared what he's learnt about the particularities of writing for real world and embodied augmentation.

In a holodeck the only real thing is you and everything only has to feel real in relation to you.
 
This gets harder the closer you get to the user.
e.g. trying to simulate clothing is unlikely to work because we know intimately how our authentic clothes are supposed to feel.
 
AUGMENTED REALITY DIFFERS FROM SCREEN MEDIA
Unlike games, where players tend to embrace identity and power fantasies, participants on the holodeck tend to role-play as themselves and stick to their known hierarchies.
 
The job of a writer, therefore, is not to create somewhere believable, but create somewhere desirable…to help participants create their own willing suspension of disbelief.
 
Rather than generate an action figure to role-play, Morgan creates the possibility space around the player with lots of space for their own role-play. The player is their own hero and you can’t assume anything about them.  
 
e.g. There is a line in ‘A Book of Spells’ (an AR game co-created with J.K. Rowling) – "Are You A Wizard or Not?"...If a player didn’t open the wonder book for 10 secs, then the non-player character (simulated) narrator would ask…."C’mon are you a wizard or not?"    In user testing this proved to be an evocative hook, participants wanted to engage as soon as they heard this.

So, what does this teach us about writing for augmented reality?
- You are not in control - There’s nothing to stop your audience moving off if they’re interested in something else.  e.g. 1st time VR players will often test NPCs for realism by doing socially unacceptable things.
-The player’s experience of the real world control is a constant negotiation between what they can do, what they can’t do and what they can get away with….so there is a need to negotiate that with them – which means that writers aren't just storytelling, they're also curating.   
-In VR storytelling, far more than in flat screen games, players are interested in the reality of the VR so everything comes under more scrutiny, which means that you have to give them a way to make sense of every limitation and control (from within the narrative, or simulation).  e.g. If you want to lock players in a room until they complete a task there needs to be a reason, or explanation for the locked door such as air locks, decontamination chambers….and you need to put the story out there for players to discover.
-In VR the player is radically embodied in the simulation in a way that they’re not in an psychologically immersive flat screen game….so just the same you have to find a new way to talk to them
-How do you do this?  You can use the power of implication, by implicating them in situation.
e.g. To encourage players to press a detonate button it might be better to pare back the script  – so that rather than allowing them to hide behind a character, the writer instead foregrounds the player's psychology at that moment i.e. don't impose a reason for them to press the evil button, but leave that reasoning up to the player.  At various points in The Assembly  (another game Morgan created) players are accused of various things, but players decide what’s actually going on. 
- If you leave room for their own motivations it stabilises their identity inside the sim.  Challenging the user to justify themselves, by accusing them of a certain motivation and forcing them to come up with them own reasoning inspires them to invest part of themselves in what they’re doing.
Which is why he began a site specific mixed reality experience with an audio provocation to the user:
-Try to act normal
-Are they still watching?
-Only you can hear me
-Just act natural
These phrases mix the user's own internal response with the staged reality, and force the user’s identity to stabilise around a few important things…something is going on, something is not as it seems, you have a job to do, you have a secret, something important is happening, just try to act normal, everything else, all the context and world-building can be filled in later.

"….and that’s how we brought our players in, not by putting them in a costume, but by telling them they were already involved, that they had a secret to protect, that it was already too late i.e. before they realised it they were already wearing the Sherlock Holmes outfit because that’s what people do.  It turns out control and identity are kind of the same thing."


We have to work alongside the player – every time we try to define who they are and what they want then we’ll force them out of immersion just as quick as if we made them run at 50 miles an hour, when all they really wanted to do was stroll, or made them play Captain Kirk when all they wanted to do was be the bad guy.

Morgan, Robert. 2016. Escaping the Holodeck Storytelling and Convergence in VR and AR. edited by GDC. U.S.: GDC. 

UI designer Steph Chow discusses how to embed a game's world into its user interface (UI), and how to strike the right balance between player immersion and player usability.
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Immersive game elements include characters, VFX (visual effects), environments and UI
 
UI is not just about bright juicy green buttons.  UI is part of an immersive strategy.
 
AR AND UI IMMERSION

• A big focus on camera visuals needs to be balanced by minimal game controls
• The balance between familiarity and fantasy is also important
• But there still needs to be a way to imply the AR world when the camera is off

 
VR and UI IMMERSION

• A huge opportunity for immersive, in-game visuals and physical interactions
• Animation, audio and haptic effects can also enhance player feedback
• But complicated tasks still require explanatory visual interfaces and accessible buttons.

 
ENGAGEMENT IN UI IMMERSION
 
Players play games not just because they are fun, but because audiences grow to love the unique worlds (fictitious universes) in which they are set.
Details that go beyond characterisation like typography, colour palettes, shapes and iconography can help to keep a player immersed and engaged.  Chow aims for a branded experience through both visuals as well as functionality.
 
The interface needs to be immersive and usable. 
The process of embedding a game’s world in its interface unfolds in 3 phases

1. Research, 2) Exploration and 3) Iteration

 

1. Research:

What is the visual culture behind your world?
This is the time to seek out the visual elements that make your world distinct.  This can be inspired by history e.g. the 1950s American iconography of the Fallout Series
Or by Nature e.g. Paradise Bay, reminiscent of oceans and rocks
Or by Subcultures e.g. Splatoon 2 takes its inspiration from punk references, including graffiti.
 
Chow recommends taking research beyond google searches – e.g.  watching movies, visiting museums

1. Exploration

It’s important to explore the spectrum offered by your ingredients

• Diegetic (included in game-world, so seen and heard by in game-characters) vs non-diegetic (only visible to players)

Diegetic is more likely to be fully immersive, easy to grasp narratively and preserves the 4th wall
But if you have a lot of information to show it can be buried in a diegetic look

• can help guide players through complex tasks by clearly separating game-play challenges from the detailed content.  Needs to be designed carefully however to avoid distraction and further complicating the task.

 
Deciding between these 2 approaches depends upon 3 things

1. Amount of platform screen space
2. The complexity of the game mechanics e.g. simple game mechanic vs complex strategy
3. How player is interacting with the game (touch, controller, camera)

 

• Skeuomorphic vs flat

Skeumorphic (incorporating non-functional design elements) creates a sense of familiarity by emulating materials whilst flat design stays true to its medium (ignoring colourful details to focus instead upon the inventory, for example, and its function in the game).
It’s worth exploring different layout options to judge the best approach.

• Layout

Can provide both immersion and usability – draws upon familiarity to improve clarity, makes functions and form clear in the visuals

• Animation

Actions can communicate timing urgencies, be pinned to interactions, direct player attention and create a sense of pace.

1. Iteration: To find the balance between narrative impact and usability

 
Things to evaluate

• Readability – Has the interface been over-designed to the point of confusion?
• Personality – Are the brand’s keywords visually implied in the design?
• Implication – Are interactive and non-interactive elements distinct and clear?
• Scale – What is the memory load of your design?

 
Also keep usability heuristics in mind

• Visibility of system status
• Match between system and the real world (e.g. using conversational language)
• User control and freedom (e.g. providing clear abort, or restart procedures)
• Consistency and standards
• Error prevention
• Recognition rather than recall
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
• Help users recognise, diagnose and recover (e.g. with simple error messages that point to solutions)
• (Easily discoverable) Help and documentation

Chow, Steph. 2018/2020. Immersing a creative world into a usable UI U.S.: Game Developers Conference.