Wild Tiles

Role:

Research, Experience, Visuals

Size:

4 People

Duration:

4 Days

Overview

An inclusively designed board game created for Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital.

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Wild Tiles is a simplistic accessible puzzle based board game. Players take turns aligning their pieces strategically onto the board and the first to place all pieces wins! 

The Problem

Many children, through accident, injury or some other misfortune, live with a disability either directly from birth or later on in life. This directly impacts how the children play. 

53% of children with disabilities have only one or no close friends and only 1% of children with disabilities spend 1 hr/day with friends outside of school. The result of various disabilities causes many game lovers, often children, to adapt uncomfortably or forgo playing entirely. 

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This means that games which neglect accessible design either somewhat or completely hinder the ability for these players to participate. 

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Game accessibility is vital; everyone deserves to play.

Design Challenge

How might we design an accessibly friendly and inclusive game for a child who lives with multiple disabilities?

We began by analyzing articles, journals and development logs all pertaining to the design of accessibly friendly games. This research helped us create design pillars that would serve as the foundation to our end-product. 

Design Pillars

Motor

Visual

Cognitive

Communication

Motor

Children with a deficit for motor movement may struggle to interact with the objects. Pieces on the board need to be large enough to grip and light enough to move. 

Visual

Players who suffer from colour blindness will have difficulty understanding the board visually. The game should not be text heavy or filled with disruptive colours. 

Cognitive

The game needs to gently test the player's cognitive abilities with respect to memory, attention, problem solving, and strategy.

Communication

Being mindful of communicative challenges such as soft speech, slow speech and use of communication devices are necessary when designing the game.  We want players to interact with one another while feeling comfortable,

We also began brainstorming on a whiteboard to visualize our rough ideas and gain a better understanding of the user and the design challenge. 

Initial Brainstorming 

We then combined our findings from the analyzed research and directed our attention towards a user persona. This became our guide for what specific challenges we want to focus on and how we'd create solutions for them.

Who Is Our User?

We explored several variations of games that prioritized simplicity and ease of use. After multiple iterations, we assembled a rough rule-set that closely followed our design pillars and best represented the battles that Sam faces.

Playtesting

With a rough idea of our game in mind, we created a quick paper prototype for the purpose of playtesting. This initial playtest allowed us to generate feedback for our game. Playing it rather than talking about it revealed areas for iteration and opportunities for new ideas worth exploring that weren't clear when simply discussing it. 

Playtesting Rules | Phase 1

Rough work of the objectives and rule set during ideation

Style Guide

Color Scheme

Base &

Monochromatic

Temptress

#490000

Fern

#55b56b

Congress Blue

#004c90

Half and Half

#ffffe3

Typography

Adobe Calson

Shapes

Designing the Pieces

We've kept our target user as the center piece to our design thus far and we needed our game piece to reflect that.  We began exploring methods for how we could interact with the board and it's pieces in a comfortable way. We also wanted the pieces to be informative, meaning they would reinforce the rules and overall design of the game. 

I sketched out some mock-ups for the pieces while remaining mindful of the constraints:

•  Squeezing, pinching and grabbing motions cannot be used.

• Objects can be slid, rolled, knocked over.

• Keep it simple; complexities may confuse the user.

• Our board requires a lot of these pieces so they need to be easy to construct.

Physical Prototype Ideation 

After some feedback from professors, we decided that one of the initial designs of the product proved to be the best option. This was due to the simplicity of the design. Players may actually have an easier time interacting with this design compared to the more complex iterations. It was also much easier to construct!

Final Physical Prototype

Final Result!

Wild Tiles was selected by judges from the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital!

Showcasing Final Game

Reflection

What began as a week long design journey quickly turned into a passion project. I had always been curious about the techniques regarding product design. Pairing that interest  with the chance to tackle an issue that affects so many people was an opportunity that I'm grateful to be a part of. I was able to learn so much about the steps needed to make not only a successful game but a successful product. The research and respect we had for the user informed our throughout the process.

Despite it being one small board game, being given the opportunity to be a part of the solution was a very rewarding experience.