Engine Software: Mega Mindy

Those of you from the Netherlands and Belgium should know this title, apparently. I myself was unfamiliar with it as it has only aired in those areas of the world, and never shown in the U.S. where I had spent my childhood. Even so, the game itself looks very nice, and despite being unfamiliar with the franchise, it’s still a game anybody could pick up and understand.

Mega Mindy is a teenage spy in the cartoon, and as such the game is about going on small missions and collecting things and taking out baddies. This is all done in a highly family friendly way, however, as the target audience for the game is roughly four and five-year-olds.

The controls are quite simple, and all done on the touch-screen: when the player gets close enough to make a jump from one area to another, an arc is drawn from their current position to the destination, and the player just needs to tap the destination and watch Mindy take care of the rest. The player does a similar gesture to use a grappling hook, and if the player wants to collect items on screen, they press a small button located at the bottom left of the screen, and they drag the stylus across the items to collect them. It’s a pretty simple control system, but it seems to work well, and is more than self-explanatory for the target audience.

Engine Software realized that, because of the age of the target audience, presenting them with a tutorial full of explanatory text which the children wouldn’t have any patience to read was not going to work, so they instead created a video tutorial in which a virtual stylus is shown on screen demonstrating all the gestures which must be made for actions such as jumping and item collection. Engine Software soon realized that after including the video tutorial to the game, when they tested with their target audience, the children picked up the controls faster, and were much better when playing the actual game. Engine Software said that they are so happy with the outcome of their video tutorials that they plan to always use them in the future in place of text based tutorials.

Finally, a little tidbit for the developer in all of us: There is a point in the game where the player must use the stylus to pull down a door handle to open a door which they must the progress through. There was a problem, however: the children pushed the handle down, and once the door was open, they kept pushing the handle down and down and down; they couldn’t comprehend that they needed to move through the newly opened door, because the object they had previously interacted with was still available to them. In the final build of the game, Engine Software made it so that once doors were opened, the handles would break off so that the player clearly understands that they are finished with the door and must move on. Gotta love it.