Overachievers Academic Trivia Game
Overview
A secondary curriculum trivia game designed to reinforce lesson standards across all subjects — built to run on Chromebooks and meet accessibility requirements for students with disabilities. The creative challenge was taking an inherently dry concept and making it feel fresh. My contributions spanned concept pitch, UX prototyping, character pipeline development, animation training, character art, and UI design and implementation.
Role
Concept pitch, UI/UX design, interactive prototyping, character design and art, character rigging and animation, Unity 2D animation pipeline development, designer training, UI art and implementation
Problem
Academic trivia is a hard sell. The content is valuable — cross-subject standards reinforcement — but the format risks feeling like a quiz dressed up with a coat of paint. The game needed a visual identity and character roster distinctive enough to make students actually want to play it. It also had to run on Chromebooks and hold up against accessibility standards.
Solution
In preproduction I pitched a concept for the game using medium-fidelity mockups. The pitch landed, and the team brought ideas of their own. I visualized those ideas through interactive prototypes in Adobe XD — demonstrating functionality, mapping user flow, and surfacing pain points before any assets were locked or development began. The prototypes let designers build assets in parallel with the developer implementing functionality. No one waiting on anyone.
Execution
With the direction set, I led research into Unity’s 2D Animation toolkit to figure out how to bring the characters to life in engine. Using existing character art as a proof of concept, I demonstrated the pipeline and techniques to the design team and got developer sign-off. Then I ran training so every designer could rig and animate their own characters independently.
I created the character art myself — a diverse roster of eclectic characters built against the project’s style guides. Then rigged and animated them through the same pipeline, delivering production-ready game animations.
For the UI, I worked closely with the lead designer to develop a mixed-media visual style: hand-drawn doodles, stickers, halftones. Built the UI art in Photoshop and Illustrator and implemented it in Unity. Created background art and a parallaxing environment to give the world a 2.5D feel.
Outcome
A trivia game with a visual identity that didn’t look like a trivia game. The Unity 2D animation pipeline I developed and taught became a shared team capability — designers who hadn’t animated in Unity before left the project able to do it on the next one.
Impact
The parallax environment, mixed-media UI style, and in-engine animation workflow all pushed the team’s Unity capability forward. The training component was deliberate — the goal wasn’t just shipping this game, it was making sure the next one started from a higher baseline.