PERMA-RUN: Development Phase

Background

After deciding to develop a 2-D platformer, I wanted to get the basics right since the core gameplay would be uniform across all the levels. In this case, it was the smartphone permissions as in-game collectibles (similar to coins in Super Mario). Apart from this, the game has enemies, other classic platformer game mechanics, and security scenarios throughout the game with a contextual narrative.

Development

  • I built the whole game in Unity Game Engine (Language: C#) and I used third party assets from itch.io and Unity asset store. I also designed custom templates using Inkscape.

  • Maintaining an easily editable codebase is basic etiquette for developers. I created game manager scripts for core functionalities like scores, game sounds, player movement. I wrote functional scripts for various game features to enable code reusability, easy maintenance and smooth development. This made it easier to rewrite parts of scripts and to include new functionalities from the research insights.

  • For Leaderboard, I integrated Dreamlo - a third-party web-based score management system. I also collected in-game telemetry data like player death coordinates, quiz answer attempts, button presses and logged the data in Google forms using Unity's HTTP functions.

  • Note: Since this is an ongoing project, the codebase will be available on Github later and, the game will be launched on Google Playstore in the near future.

Design & Research

After developing the first build, I conducted a Heuristic Analysis for Playability with other researchers. With the insights from the heuristic analysis, I went back to the whiteboard, made some design changes and included them in-game. Later, I conducted a 2x2 between-study and compared the game with an existing education document for smartphone security awareness (Refer to the research section for more details).

Design Research