Karaton is an educational game which teaches children from 6 to 12 years old to read, spell and understand words. Karaton is also a very thematic game. You will explore islands, meet the mystical barks and build your own base on the island. You can play minigames to gain resources. These minigames act as the different exercises a child can do.

​

Karaton also has a prominent online platform where parents and teachers can monitor the childs progress. Through this platform exercises can be tailored specifically to the child.

In my company we had several communication channels. In weekly meetings, everyone discussed what they had done the previous week and what they would be doing coming week.

We also had daily stand-ups. These were a quick overview of what everyone would be doing for the day. This helped to keep everyone on schedule and be notified quickly of any issues.

​

Using 'Slack' we were able to ask any further questions or plan any in between meetings if necessary.

My internship can be divided into three big parts. My first few months I worked on desiging new minigames. After that I worked on systems which were more integrated to the core of Karaton. After that we were transitioned to a new project called "Aap Zee Koe".

The minigames were fully my responsibility. From the design phase to their completion. At first I wrote down a lot of small ideas, a few of which I expanded upon and presented. We would then choose one I would work on for the next two weeks. I would create and plan out the required tasks. After the two weeks I would present my prototype.

The first minigame I made was "Island Discovery". Here I created a new minigame structure but also learned to work with existing code. I had to work with the given educational rules and exercise type (This was the case for all minigames). The art I made was supposed to be temporary but should convey the idea of the game clearly. This is why I went beyond just grey boxes.

The second minigame was called "Runegate". In this exercise the player has to split the words into syllables. I designed a custom rune font, improved the minigame structure and learned more about mobile input systems.

The "Pirate ship" minigame is a lot bigger and ambitious than the other ones. This spelling exercise features a fully destructable ship, loading and firing a set of cannons and a crowd of cheering 'pirate' barks. Altough I think the code, animations and art is well designed, the core idea of the minigame design was lacking. The focus was no longer on the exercise and rounds took too long to complete.

Karaton featured on Item Builder project for the developers. From this project you could more easily design new asset bundles. Working on this project teached me a lot about Unity editor functionality, such as custom GUI, editor run scripts and hotkeys.

I reworked Karaton's inventory system by adding in auto expanding, sorting and filtering functionality. I was able to (Re)work with existing code and debug systems which were previously unknown to me.

After a couple of months we had to test and merge our work into the main branch. During this time I had some time to work on my fourth minigame the "Puzzle box". My goal for this one was to learn from the pirate ship game and instead make a much cleaner, to the point minigame. The Puzzle box game had fast paced and intuitive rounds. I was also able to use my knnowledge of the editor functionality and the animation structure of the pirate ship minigame.