WallyKazzam: Letter and Word Magic
Letter and Word Magic is a preschool literacy app based on the Nick Jr. show Wallykazam! that features non-threatening ogres, dragons, giants, and fairies to teach early reading skills like letter recognition, letter tracing, and phonics. Kids create their own user account (up to four accounts on each device) and explore the village, playing four different mini-games.
•Search for letters in Wally’s forest, but watch out for that troublemaking Bobgoblin!
•Help Libby Light Sprite trace letters in the night sky!
•Build a gravity defying word tower out of rhyming words to reach Gina Giant!
•Earn magic words that can transform Borgelorp. Make him big. Make him blue. Even make him burp!
The Vision
Nickelodeon came to Smashing Ideas (the Agency I worked with) because they wanted an award-winning app for their new reading-focused property.
They had multiple characters to work with and some high-level ideas. I had experience working with Unity, and 3D, and this allowed us to propose a wild idea: Creating a 3d map that responds to the iPad movement. The characters appeared on the hub, welcoming you in. Each area of the app had a character host and a different game mechanic.
I produced all of the UX app flow screens after collaborative workshop brainstorms and was responsible for early concept sketching for each game’s mechanic, to assist our engineers and me to build prototypes.
Designing the experience
Each game has leveling and scaffolding to ensure rigor and the right level of difficulty.
To increase motivation to play, we leveraged multiple engagement strategies, included “magic words” that kids could collect and then apply to the Bangalorp character to see how he would react. We also added a “surprise” button that would appear every so often, revealing a ridiculous interactive moment of play that made kids giggle and want to discover it again.
I created the layouts for the interactive panning map and the backgrounds level layouts for each game, using a combination of Cinema 4D & Unity. I also created some of ambient and transition animations, including the flag unrolling animations on the castle activity.