Garden Guardians

An engaging iPad/tablet game aimed at younger kids (8-12 years old) to help educate them about sustainable practices and the benefits of urban gardening.

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Inspiration

Garden Guardians was inspired by a discussion our team had regarding the most engaging way to learn as a younger child in the 21st century. We considered how video games are becoming much more mainstream and accessible, and collectively felt that instead of having to participate in a school-mandated online module, having a fun, interactive game where children are encouraged to explore gardening and sustainability concepts at their own pace would be much more effective. Finally, especially with upcoming shifts in political power, educating younger generations about sustainability is incredibly important.

What it does

In Garden Guardians, children are encouraged to plant virtual gardens, learn about sustainable practices, and tackle challenges like picking up trash, planting seeds, adding compost, and harvesting crops all while learning about environmental benefits. Our goal was to foster a love for nature and a deeper understanding of sustainability, all while creating a positive, low-pressure environment where learning feels like play. We wanted to empower young players to feel like they’re making a difference in the virtual world—and hopefully, inspire them to bring that knowledge to their real lives too.

How we built it

Our user research consisted of mining academic papers and articles, distributing a survey to 20 participants, and conducting one interview with an individual in the age range we were investigating. We used a few different platforms to create the assets in this game and format it. Primarily, the background was completed in Unreal Engine Fortnite using public assets for individual buildings. All of the drawings were completed in Procreate (on an iPad). The storyline was formatted and prototyped in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We were a bit too overambitious with aspects of our project and found ourselves struggling to stay on track with the goals we had set for ourselves. We also had a few issues with the contrast of the Procreate assets from our background and text, so we had to play around and redo some of the assets. Additionally, as college students, our resources were limited, so while we were able to interview one adolescent, most of our feedback had to come from a retrospective survey of our own experiences and assumptions about what would appeal to younger players. This approach wasn't ideal, but it allowed us to gather some valuable insights while working within our time and resource constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All of our sprites and our environment are custom-made. One of our team members took the artistic lead around that, while the other worked incredibly hard to format it all in Figma and made the stylistic choices. We worked incredibly well as a team and created a very unique interface and storyline. While we have a lot of work left to do around this project, we are incredibly proud of what we were able to accomplish in the duration of this designathon.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned a lot about balancing ambition with feasibility—especially when it comes to project scope and time management. We should have parsed out our time and divided tasks a lot earlier in the process. We learned a lot about sustainability throughout the process and are looking to continue exploring the intersection between climate/sustainability education and game design! We also learned about the value of using various tools like Unreal Engine, Procreate, and Figma, allowing us to integrate different creative elements to create a visually engaging final product.

What's next for Garden Guardians

We would like to continue prototyping our game and adding more features. We hope to add more backgrounds (for the introduction, for example), more asset options so the user can actually select different seeds/items, more tasks, and more animations to show what the user is doing. We need to conduct a lot more user research with individuals in the age range of 8-12 so that our design can be more accurately informed (we need to integrate a lot more Value-Sensitive Design practices). There are some issues with game logic, so we would like to flush those out as well. Finally, in our user research, the eight-year-old we interviewed expressed interest in the possibility of implementing a cooking crops function, so potentially adding more features similar to that is another step. Holistically, we would like to continue developing this game and make it more polished so that we can move into user testing!

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