Complete puzzles and use math to get to ancient treasures.
- My job: game designer, level designer
- Math game for children
- Puzzle game
- Learn math by completing puzzles
- DOWNLOAD & PLAY
Development time: 4 months
Anpu and Pon is a puzzle game created to let children learn how to apply math. You play as Anpu, a treasure hunter that came to this jungle to find some treasure. Your buddy Pon is your backpack. He gives you tips and will sometimes randomly talk to you. Instead of the game simply giving you boring calculus questions there are puzzles that require you to use math as a tool to solve them. Apples can be thrown into a basket to tilt a bridge so the player can cross, or pots can be placed to move a platform. Anpu and Pon makes kids think of ways to apply what they learned in school, and serves a supporting role to the material taught in school.
Simply giving the player a math problem to solve is boring, so our puzzles really had to be a part of the level itself. To keep the children engaged we moved away from showing numbers on the screen and instead visualized them through objects. All objects had their own weight and they can all be used to solve the game’s puzzles.
The design of the level was a big challenge. At first we wanted to create this huge world, but due to time restrictions this wasn’t feasible. We reduced our scope to just the jungle portion so we could still play around with many of the ideas we had. A big snake serves as a believable progression blocker and the waterfall is a nice aesthetic that makes the world feel alive. The game is set at night time because we actually really wanted to do a night time level so we could play around with lighting in interesting ways.
For this game I worked on the game and level design. I created levels with grayboxes, worked with artists to create assets, rapid and paper prototyped puzzles, created cutscenes, designed systems, made game design documents and lead playtests. Worked in SCRUM style and used Unity Collab to sync all our work together.
Made in: Unity