Cactus Mania and Kids, Games, and Dark Patterns is my undergraduate exhibition thesis project that brings the current mobile gaming trends and manipulative UI practices proliferate in kids' mobile content to light. My primary objective of this thesis is to inform parents of mobile trends and to also provide applicable solutions through the presentation and development of a mobile game that is playable in the exhibition space. On top of exposing the mobile trends, I also created and fully developed Cactus Mania, a mobile game for kids ages 6-12 to express an alternative to the present mobile gaming options.
User research and thesis development were the primary focus of the thesis development and argument. Apart from the research and game development, the CVA exhibition space included a comprehensive video that expressed the primary findings of my research as well as key highlights in Cactus Mania. This thesis project gave me the opportunity to explore rich and deep avenues of application development, game design, and using many of the industry standard programs and platforms to produce the mobile game experience. Cactus Mania was made using the Unity game engine and coded with the C# programing language—almost all assets were created and produced by me.
Applications used:
Unity
Blender
Logic Pro
Illustrator
After Effects
Premiere Pro
Visual Studio
Cactus Mania started with a few ideas and concepts drawn on paper. This is what guided the first steps of the game system design and primary gameplay loop. The first few stages of this sketching process was to find a simple gameplay loop with the potential to allow the assets and visuals to populate the game space. The next few sketches took the primary concepts in this first sketch and helped layer the game style and game feel.
.svg)
The main applications used for the development and creation of Cactus Mania are Blender, Logic Pro, Adobe Illustrator, and the Unity Engine. Each program had a large set of tools and systems that allowed me to explore and create a large range of game assets and sounds in order to populate the project. Each one of these applications contains a steep learning curve and required a massive amount of time to understand and implement.
I wanted to use this project to become a much larger system and thesis that would hopefully bring a larger sense of impact and scale. I’ve started to research what I believed would bridge the world of game development, Cactus Mania ,and a senior thesis .From this point, I started to find a deeper correlation between the active and dynamic mobile game platforms and how unregulated and wild the work and practice had become. My thesis then began to take shape around the massive mobile platform and how many developers were taking advantage of children in this field specifically.
Down below is the short video that played inside the exhibition space.
The solution to the thesis was a similar game made using the same game engine as the majority of mobile games. However, the primary focus of the development of the game was to focus on play and allow the game to stand on its own. Cactus Mania was centered around the user and did not use the same dark patterns or deceptive system that the majority of mobile games use. This development and presentation of the game would hopefully express to the public the possibilities of funding and helping game designers and developers create high-quality gaming experiences without the need to implement dark patterns or provocative advertisement structures
This thesis' primary deliverable was the development and production of Cactus Mania. Since the game was fully playable and functional in the CVA space, the game had to be developed in C# and created in the Unity game engine. I wanted to express the primary complexity of developing the game. Not only would the game be sound and built for mobile applications, but the exhibition space was also part of the thesis expression.
Game development is one of the most complex and highly abstract interactable experiences that contains a rich environment of user-centered design and practice. Creating a video game using code was a passion project of mine that started back in 2015 and has stuck with me ever since. I’ve always had an immense interest in game design and development and how the use of gaming experiences can enhance psychological and social interaction with the user. This thesis and exhibition space was an incredible opportunity for me to combine the complex world of game design into the defining and clear communication of Design.
