MICAH VARGAS

INFO

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Game Development
Unity
C#
Aseprite
3
Developer
9 months

ABOUT

WildeKey is a web-hosted, 2D educational game designed to make learning to type engaging and fun for elementary school students. Players explore colorful, cartoon-inspired worlds as a wildebeest wizard, unlocking new sections of the keyboard and encountering a variety of whimsical creatures while progressing through levels.

Created to integrate into Sandy Spring Friends School cirriculum, our team composing of two developers and one mentor worked on this project for 9 months. Our project had an emphasis on implementing a strong development plan, using story-boarding, and a Gantt Chart.

TYPING

WildeKey includes 2 forms of gameplay/typing:

Most levels consist of 'lane typing'. In this mode the player switches between lanes typing out creatures running towards them. The goal is to type out creatures before they reach you. Once enough creatures have been typed out, the level is complete.

At the end of each world is a 'boss fight'. These act as traditional typing tests where the player is presented a body of text to type out as fast as possible.

We also present dialogue text to the player on certain levels. While this text is not typed out, it is visualized on screen character by character using a for loop.

At the end of each level the player is shown a score and accuracy. If the level was lane typing they're shown the number of creatures saved. If the level was a boss fight they're shown their words per minute (WPM). For reference, WPM is the standard for measuring typing speed.

Expanding Core Systems with Dynamic Design

We prioritized making WildeKey’s systems flexible and reusable, leading to the creation of two special levels that extended core mechanics.

Fortress Level: Initially, levels consisted of either lane typing or boss fights, loaded as separate scenes. To create a fortress level combining both, we refactored the system by converting scene objects into prefabs, allowing seamless instantiation of the boss immediately after defeating the creatures at the castle gate.

Final Level: The lane system was originally built to support a dynamic number of lanes, but this feature was deprioritized during polish. I later reimplemented it for the final level, which introduced three lanes (compared to the standard two). With bosses also converted into prefabs, the final encounter featured a multi-phase boss fight requiring players to complete three separate bodies of text.

Abstracting Entities with ScriptableObjects

To streamline development and reduce redundancy, we abstracted creatures and bosses using two custom ScriptableObject data types:

CreatureData: Included fields for name, world, movement speed, and a list of running sprites.

BossData: Included fields for name, world, default text, and a list of idle sprites.

This abstraction allowed both characters to share the same prefabs (Creature and Boss), dynamically loading their respective data at runtime.

WORLD MAP / TILEMAP

Along WildeKey's adventure there are:
- 6 unique areas
- 27 different levels

Each area progressively add more portions of the keyboard to practice.

The world map was built using Unity's Tilemap system from the 2D Tilemap Editor package. This allowed for a tilemap (a grid of tiles) to be placed using a Tile palette. All tiles were drawn as 8x8 squares that interconnect seamlessly.

See the tile palette below:

PIXEL ART & ANIMATION

Custom color palette made for the games art:

Bosses each with an idle animation:

Creatures each with a run cycle:

Backgrounds for different areas:

GANTT CHART

ACCESSIBILITY

The entire game is playable in three different font choices, swappable in the main menu.

Included is OpenDyslexic, a typeface designed against the common symtoms of dyslexia and made to be easily legible.

DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

To maintain a certain standard of inclusion, we decided that all human characters with skin would have multiple versions to represent different skin colors. We made this decision to promote diversity, especially since our game was being made for elementary school students.

MICAH MATEO VARGAS

Game Developer