Summary:

PlayMath™ is a series of fun puzzles whose core underlying mechanics rely on mathematical concepts.
Those puzzles scale to offer level of difficulties within a single game type that can address different math concepts taught through elementary school, and beyond in many cases.
They are aimed to be used either for fun at home or in an organized way in classrooms, and as such the PlayMath™ product includes a number of teacher tools.

Difficulties:

The fundamental goal of this product was a design challenge by itself:
- Having reusable game concept that can span different grades and cover multiple concepts through this grades.
- Avoiding the drill dry Math exercise format that some concurrent product use.
- Make sure to include in each game mechanics some puzzle elements to create a fun factor.
Managing involvement and feedback from teachers in pilot schools with already very busy schedule was another notable challenge.

Solutions:

1 - Hire a former Math teacher with a degree in project management for games to manage this project (that would be me).
2 - Work with a partner: EDC, who owns a number of math curriculum with a different approach to each topics and exercise (e.g. Think Math!™). Go through this curriculum to see what interesting gamelike exercise have similar look and feel through the grades and use that as a starting point for the design of our games.
3 - Create an early testable product and maintain and improve it to build a cycle of tests and iterations.

Praises:

The product:
Demonstrated in trade shows we got a lot of positive feedback: "It's so much better that the product those other person are doing, a shame you don't have their budget!", "That is what we needed! I will talk to our math coordinators about this." ...

Our partner EDC was so enthusiastic after the end of the current phase of this project that they decided to move on with it by funding a new joint venture with us.

Some Whyville users:
"... Is it lame that I think this game is really fun? I could spend hours on it xD"
"another fun game that offers a nice challeng you guys are doing great"
"Ok, I liked loved this game ALOT, once me and my friend were playing for almost an hour."
"i actually really like this game a lot. its interesting and a fun puzzle. 10/10 would play just for fun"
"I really like the game! I am currently on level 17, and it is a little difficult, but I always like a challenge. I hope to see more games like this! :)"
"Agreed. I have had various accounts throughout my years on whyville and now I'm 18 and have been through math classes and some of the problems in the later levels include what I am doing with math now :p And its great for visualization in learning."

The producer:
Among other praises by my team,and my superiors, I remember that during one of our call with our partner at EDC they half jokingly asked if I would consider a career with them.

Summary:

A number of appliances drain power when you don't use them, this is called "Vampire Power".

The Vampire Power project in Whyville is developed in partnership with the University of North Texas (UNT). It provides both a game that develop awareness about the phenomenon of Vampire Power to be used by any Whyville users, and a specific partnership with various teachers to build workshop mixing real-life experiment and measurement and their virtual world extension in Whyville.

Difficulties:

One of our game mechanics involved appliances added to various random chatrooms for kids to measure and act on all over the virtual world of Whyville. This created an issue with the scale and style of each room. As well as the theme. (How do you justify an electric heater on the beach?)

Another aspect of the activity was an area were you could list appliances in your home and ask kids that are working in classrooms for information on your appliances so you could evaluate the Vampire Power happening in your real life home.
This brought the difficulty of letting classroom kids know about the requests from other Whyville users, and have them answer them.

Solutions:

1 - We built a system to create sublists of appliances by type of rooms.
2 - We designed each appliances in multiple size format.
3 - We created a tool that allowed us to design for each room the format to use and the exact position to pick for the appliance.
4- We created a villain persona: "Count Ampula" the Power Vampire. That is crazed for power and is the one putting appliances all over the virtual world: hence justifying some of the weirdness that happened.
5 - We created a special beanie gifted to kids working with classroom that would make their avatar more recognizable and help kid come to them with questions.
6 - We had a part of our community management team keep an eye on measurement indicated by kids to avoid bogus values.

Praises:

We built a pleasant partnership with UNT who decided on their next project that they would like to once again work with us.

A teacher testimonial:
"My students have been on Whyville finally for a few weeks now. They are a bit crazy about it. There is chatter from them about using the site at home as well.

I had one of my students making money in the salon today during our free Whyville explore session. She has over 10,000 clams already. Not too sure if that is a mother load in the short amount of time we have been working on the site? I have another student who is now at about 90 something in salary and is pretty motivated. He is also a struggling reader & writer and determined to "read to understand" so he can perform well on various tasks! "

Summary:

Project Tricho is issued form a partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The goal is to gameify a tedious task and have the Whyville kids provide a task force to help Real life scientist evaluate micro-organism population evolutions by estimating which of them are present in a number of photos taken by an automated submarine.

Difficulties:

One of the first obvious problem was: how to make the activity of looking at many similar looking black and white pictures to identify micro organism fun and rewarding.

The second important issue was to be able to teach kids what to look for to recognize the different type of micro organism.

The third elements to consider was that it was important for kids to take that activity seriously and provide quality feedback for the data issued from the game played to be of any use to scientists.

Solutions:

1 - We created a system of feedback that explain what are the common error in misidentifying some of those micro-organism. And apply those feedback on wrong identification of ringers.
2 - We made kid play through successive rounds of X images ( we picked x = 9) including 0-3 ringers and reward them for streak of accuracy on the ringers.
3 - We Communicated to the kids that they are helping real scientist.
4 - We added internal promotion of the activity by having a "wandering avatar" appear in chatroom to inform kids about the activity and prompt them to come help scientists.
5 - We provided unique rewards for this activity that were valuable to kids.
6 - We tested results by having a team of scientists at WHOI hand analyse a batch that kids in Whyville identified with an evaluated accuracy threshold of 90% or above and evaluate the real accuracy.

Summary:

Whyville is unique in that when creating their avatars, each element they choose to use can be attributed different Z-depth and moved around freely. This means that even without the millions of existing Face-parts (mostly created by kids) there is a quasi infinite number of ways to assemble an avatar.

This brought the need to be able to save an avatar you are happy with so you can try a different look and come back to it.

This feature is what the Wardrobe project is providing to Whyville kids.

Difficulties:

With the diversity of wealth resulting from Whyville being over 16 year old it was tricky to find a good pricing system for this new feature: one that would still help sanitize the economy by offering an expensive desired feature, but not make it totally unavailable to new users.

With the ability to gift or sale face parts between users, there was no guarantee that a saved face could be loaded at a later time.

Solutions:

1 - One free slot for all... And an exponentially growing pricing for subsequent saving slots provided a pricing matching the best of both world.
2 - A smart color code would indicate that a face could only be partially loaded.
3 - The code would look at the face part type id rather than it's unique id to allow for substitution if a user owns multiple identical part and got rid of one of the copy.

Praises :

As expected for a feature that was developed by popular demand, users were very happy to have it, and thanked us profusely for it.
to the main coder: "You are a saint"
"Thanks sooo much!! (:"
"I freaking love you!!!!!"

Summary:

Whyville is a virtual world where we have events to have fun with the community: Halloween, Mardi Gras , Prom , Whyville's Birthday ...and more.
But Whyville is also a 16 year old virtual world so some parties needed to be revamped. The most recent changes being a brand new location for Whyville's Prom and Whyville's winter ball. A re-skinned Mrrdi Gras party with floats. And a revisited Halloween party with bigger chat rooms (the average screen size has evolved since our first Halloween party in 1999).

Difficulties:

As with any project made for the community, we have to be careful to keep the scope under control so as not to steal too much resources from other client project.

A lot of this events are time sensitive and have a hard launch date.

Solutions:

No secret here: just good planning and communication with all of the project managers/producers during weekly project management meetings.

Summary:

William James College has teamed up with Whyville to bring problem solving skills and other tips to help kids learn about their emotions.

In the Wellness Center, kids can discover useful activities, information, and resources about social emotional wellness.

Difficulties:

The very sensitive subject of mental health and emotions can be very tricky to tackle with adolescent and kids.

An important aspect is the willingness to share and talk about those topic kids usually shy away from.

Solutions:

By partnering with William James College (formerly MSPP: Massachussetts School of Profesional Psychiatry) we could involve trained professional psychologist in the design of our activity.

By providing a unique face part that changes color based on your stated mood, we brought the mood and emotion sharing to the chatroom. By adding the ability to react to a mood with unique animated projectiles, we created a new feature for our users that gave them a reason to interact and share about emotion social wellness.

Praises:

The Product:
From Whyville users:
"I love this new mood thing!" X3
"Oh so THIS is what City Hall mentioned! I like it!"
"i like the part where you answer the five questions about your day/mood. i feel like this will be good for me especially like today. so thank you for adding it. it'll help me keep track of my thought process since i'm not one to write anything down."

As read at adolescentwellness.org/:
Have you ever wished your son or daughter had better skills to manage emotion? All children can now access a resource through the web to enhance problem solving and coping skills. This novel way of introducing healthy thinking techniques was designed by the Freedman Center for Child and Family Development at William James College in partnership with NWhyville virtual Wellness Center PIP loftumedeon, founders of the Whyville collaborative play site.

Summary:

Survival, horror at the sunless depths of the Pacific Ocean. Stranded on the seafloor with low light and few tools, an industrial diver takes desperate steps to surface before his oxygen — and sanity — give out.

The project is ongoing and to be released (on Steam)in spring 2016. I was involved in a 6 month pre-production phase that took place in 2011-2012 at the prestigious French videogame school ENJMIN.

Difficulties:

During the preproduction the team was built of students, and of the 2 graphic artists, only one was proficient in 3D animations which the game relied heavily on.

Moreover, the animations of crowds (fishes in this case) and of enemies couldn't rely on traditional AI techniques given that they had 6 degrees of freedom, instead of the usual 3.

Solutions:

We focused our 2D artist on building an artbook and taking care of all the printed materials that would be needed.
We also allocated part of our budget to buy a library of underwater assets.

To solve the AI issue, we offered the middleware company SPIROPS a partnership in which we tested their AI tools and provided a list of needs to improve them.

Praises:

The Current Product:
Awards:
"SXSW Gamer's Voice Nominee" Austin,TX - 2015
"Nominee (Console/PC Hardcore)" Game Connection Development Awards - 2014
"Honorable Mention (Student Competition)" IGF (SF, USA) - 2013

In the Press:
"More than the typical "survival horror" genre this is "survival," with some psychological horror woven in, most directly through narration as you are treated the to inner monologue of a man in serious trouble."
-Steven Hansen, Destructoid
"It’s a fascinating project so far ... and the tension it generates is impressive."
-Philippa Warr, Rock Paper Shotgun
"The developers call it a walking coffin and after a few minutes of play time using the Oculus Rift I understand why."
-Brian Crecente, Polygon
"...c'est une belle surprise immersive que nous livre le studio Honor Code."
Indius
"The Oculus Rift is no stranger to horror games, but Narcosis is the best-looking of its breed I’ve played."
-Tim Turi, Game Informer
"Drowning in 3D can be fun! The horror of Narcosis is amplified by the Oculus Rift."
-Ian Hinck, Game Trailers
"Honor Code wants an immersive experience, one that will bring very real world fears to life."
-Ozzie Mejia, Shacknews
"There’s no need to invent the horrors that lie under the ocean, in fact. What’s there in real life is intense enough, as Narcosis shows"
EGMNow
"This is every nightmare you ever had while watching The Abyss, but you're inside the game itself."
-Ben Kuchera, Polygon
"They told me the demo wasn't too scary, but I just about panicked anyway."
-Miranda Sanchez, IGN
"I expected a big jump scare, but Honor Code's more subtle route really impressed me and helped sustain the tension moving forward."
-Tim Turi, Game Informer
"It’s a new take on horror, and one that completely immerses you in an experience that was designed to make the most of early VR technology."
-John Gaudiosi, Fortune
"The grim narration ultimately enhances the game’s atmosphere with creepy descriptions and unnerving foreshadowing."
-Geoff Thew, Hardcore Gamer

Summary:

Developed with Unity3d and targeting the iPad2, this game is a game of dreamlike (more nightmare-like) puzzles.
The iPad is a camera to the world of a nightmare and the sound helps you know what is there that you don't see.
Each level is a puzzle in which you absorb the light (at your feet: forces you to look away from whatever danger is lurking), and then use it to rebuild different part of the scene. Once a scene is completed you escape to the next level. Once the player starts to learn the game an enemy appears (in later levels) that moves slowly toward you. Only by looking at it can you stop its progression creating a tricky timer to how long you have to complete each scenario.

Difficulties:

The original design of this 3 month project was closer to an augmented reality games where ghost would lurk in different location of a physical place. The lack of precision of in door localization (at least with the budget constraint we had) forced us to redesign the project.

Using the iPad as a camera that reveals was at the core of the original idea and was kept, but it meant that the only way to inform you about things happening where you are not looking was through sound. Using only an iPad we were limited to stereo.

As the project started the iPad2 was just out and the one we had ordered wasn't here yet, we only received it 1 month before the deadline for the project.

Solutions:

0 - As the project started we focused our effort in evaluating the feasibility of our first idea. This focused effort allowed us to modify the core concept of the project early enough in the 3 month deadline to be able to complete the project in time.
1 - We rethought the project to only allow the player a rotation using the Ipad2 built in sensors. but still giving the player 3 degrees of freedom in the way he wanted to orient his camera.
2 - One of the five member of the team was a sound engineer: Axel Speller, he built a fake binaural effect to create some sense of localization in the stereo sound (we had to ask the player to use a headset to play).
3 - Good project management allowed to define tasks that could be pursued without requiring the possession of the iPad for the first 2 month.
4 - A negotiation with the Prime31 team allowed us to obtain free of charge their unity plug-ins to take care of all the data from the iPad sensors, thus saving us precious time.

Praises:

The Product:
As a school project and despite all the difficulties encountered that delayed us, this was delivered on time and received an A.

Entered in the student game competition at ACE 2011, this project received the first place. (Gold medal)

Summary:

For a "mini-project", a complete team (user experience specialist, game designer, graphic designer, programmer ,sound designer, and manager) had to develop a complete game in five weeks.
The concept is quite simple: there is a circular entity in space which is attacked. To survive, there are various types of "power-ups" falling on the planetoid which enable it to shoot the enemies. Then, by tilting the joystick (PS3 Sixaxis system) the player can turn the planet to adjust the shots. When the entity is shot by an enemy, an impact remains reshaping it until the heart is hit, which is a game over.

Difficulties:

The project was to be completed in only 5 weeks with 9 persons efforts to coordinate.
In the middle of those 5 weeks were classes AND a 2 week break around Christmas and New-Year celebrations during which everyone was going to see their family.

Solutions:

We set up a Redmine and a SVN to share tasks and do some versioning while telecommuting.
Through proper management we identified tasks that could be done in the 2 weeks vacation period without needing too much interaction with other resources, and we attributed those tasks to their respective resources.

Results:

This project got top grades.

While everyone was excited and went overboard with this first game project opportunity, resulting in a lot of persons missing classes to finish their respective projects, the ECHO team managed to receive top grades without a single element of the team missing a single class.