LIPA LAND

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GAME DESIGN

This is where it all started for me! I got a game design position at Lipa Learning thanks to my teaching background and education and it was a wild ride.

Lipa Land is an educational platform for preschool children housing games, stories, articles and more. I jumped on board to design games and it was a great place to learn the ropes. As it often goes with start-ups, the project had lofty goals and a fairly inexperienced team trying to reach them, so roles are blurred and responsibilities are shared. I was tossed in the chaotic waves and I had swim or sink like a rock.

I had to learn very fast and take initiative. In a span of a month I went from a basic understanding of game design to writing design docs from start to finish. The beginnings were rough, but I’m proud of how fast I adapted.

Thanks to the nature of the platform, I had the opportunity to work on many games and deliver several myself. The amount of experience I got in a single a year was invaluable. System design, UI, level design, play testing – I did everything a game designer can on those adorable little games. I also had to produce many of them, so I quickly grasped documentation and project management, which led to another step forward.

Biggest Challenge
There were many, but if I had to pick a stand out struggle, it would be scrapping work. Learning new skills and getting things done has never been a problem for me, but hearing something will not make it into the final product was very hard. I learned from the experience and it made me a much better designer and team leader down the road.

Biggest Achievement
Delivering games assigned to me and getting promoted. Despite my lack of experience when I joined, I managed to deliver 5 games (Traffic Lights, Rush Hour, Explore and Go, Knight Craft, Colour Me Eggs) and help with many others. Knowing I can take a project from a concept to a finished game in the hands of players was very important for me.

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CONTENT MANAGER

After roughly a year of asking annoying questions about the product, I was given the chance to try and fix what I thought was broken. Lipa had a wealth of content, but it was all disconnected and competed for time in the production pipeline. Our solution to the problem was to create what we called Worlds – different in-game lands that would provide more cohesion. You can imagine them as sections of Disney Land. I was promoted to Content Manager to help bring this new approach to light.

I wore multiple hats. I was the producer of all content (games, stories, articles), making sure we’re all on the same roadmap and schedule. I was also a co-director of sorts, making sure all content within the same World shares the same educational values, themes, story lines and aesthetics across all teams. For example, if there was a game within the Pirate world about fishing out garbage from the ocean, I had to make sure there would also be a story and educational content covering the same thing.

The approach was successful. Lipa Land gained cohesion and an interconnected flow that led the user through its content, providing them with lots of educational content as they went. Production was rocky and everchanging, but the established roadmap guided us towards multiple releases.

Biggest Challenge
Balancing requirements from the leadership. Setting up a plan, communicating it and then executing it with a team came naturally to me, but the constant changes of set plan were not as easy. I pivoted to a more agile flow to give the teams wiggle room to address unexpected changes and I learned how to shield my process from intervention by always prioritizing delivering a minimal prototype fast. The secret sauce to success turned out to be good ol’ fashioned confidence and accountability. Once things started working and I could see the team was delivering, it became much easier to stand my ground.

Biggest Achievement
Restructuring the app’s content into interconnected worlds and delivering everything on time with reworked UI. The idea to connect everything together seemed impossible at first. Lipa Land already had hundreds of different content items and restructuring the app would mean redesigning the majority of them with the new vision in mind. So I did. It took a tremendous amount of work and effort across multiple teams, but the result was great.