Successful experiments with educational games in the Discovery Content team allowed me to get the green light to create my own educational game development team as part of the Business Development Department.

First, I defined the workflow and the roles to have inside the team. Second, I started hiring. And in the end, I got a team of 8 people: developers, game designers and 2d-artists.

In 2021, we continued to work on Skysmart Interactive Platform and Skysmart Solutions. We have not had our own product yet, and in general, throughout the year, we were looking for a place where we could apply our competencies as efficiently as possible.

Experiments with the Skysmart Solutions user motivation system to increase the intensity of content use.

Design and development of a New Year advertising calendar with games and gifts.

At the end of 2021, we decided to prototype an edutainment game for kids 4-9 years old that would call Galaxy in the future.

Galaxy is the sandbox where a kid can have fun playing educational games with funny characters. Players can explore the Spaceship, draw and learn English words in a playful way. We designed this game with children, and our methodists included learning elements into the gameplay that fits with our overall language learning program.

Preliminary focus group results and information from our research suggested that the game is quite capable of keeping the child entertained and allowing the parent to engage the child's attention or use the product as a reward for good behavior.

All my team worked together for preparing to beta release of our app. We tried to get the release in the first week of June 2022 and successfully did it. To do it we solved some design problems and produce more educational content for the game.

After the release, we got a lot of positive feedback and data and we decided that we need to focus on two things: transferring our Skysmart students to Al Galaxy players and learning how we can manage time metrics such as session length and total weekly playtime.

First, we used our school's main page to promote our game to students and their parents.
The next diagram shows our audience before September when we used only our in-company channels to promote Al Galaxy to our colleagues and in September we ran stories on the school's main page.

In general, we got good results if you analyzed it as relative growth of metrics in percent. But absolute values were too small for us. We thought that we can better.

By the way, you will see our creatives with the best conversion and main page' banner next.

Next time we decided that we can get new players from our regular lesson with teachers. We designed special lessons and create new content for our popular courses where we include information about our game.

And after that, we got x5 growth of our audience. Our game has become as big as the all-English course for children at Skysmart school. It was a big win for my team.

We also developed Laboratory Update where we tried and successfully increased our time metrics to the value we needed.

Laboratory Update contained two big parts: the new educational game where kids can learn ABC and the total rework of the right side of Starship. The kids loved the update. We again received positive feedback and increased the session length and total weekly time even more than expected.

Next update we added Cartoons from our English courses. Kids who study in our Skysmart school can watch cartoons in their lessons and homework but now they also can do it in our game.

After this half year, our little students spend +50% more time in our school because they play Al Galaxy. It was our goal to create an experience that loved kids and increase our time metrics.

Also, we got many positive reviews from kids and their parents that warm our team this year.

I analyzed the game data and met with some players. You can review the presentation about my product research that I shared with my colleagues. In this presentation, I explain how and why we created this game, how it works, what conversions we observed before installation, and what our young players and their parents think about the game.
Listen to the audio recordings from the interviews:

1. A girl answers a question about what she remembers from the game. It's noteworthy that she made up names for all the characters and also little stories about them.
   ▶️Listen to the audio recording (in Russian).
2. A response from a player's mother regarding the amount of time available for playing. This is an important recording where you can hear how a parent differentiates between simple games and educational games.
   ▶️Listen to the audio recording (in Russian).

In 2023, we transitioned from outsourcing 3D models to developing all game resources in-house. This move led us to shift our game's core design to 2D.
We redesigned our visual style and characters, gathering feedback from dedicated players like Vita and Polina. This feedback was invaluable in guiding our redesign.

Next, you can take a look at short gameplay clips of the updated game.

And the trailer of course.

Our game's technical framework was also restructured. Now, features reflect Skysmart school lessons, enhancing student engagement. For instance, students interact with letters they've studied in lessons, continuing their learning and earning rewards. Additionally, we've refined our analytics to incorporate academic experiments, such as one on Executive functions.

After completing the significant refactoring project, I received a promotion with expanded responsibilities.
Learn more about my next position at Skyeng here.