What designers can learn from kids’ games

You wouldn’t think that children’s games have a whole lot in common with games like World of Warcraft or Clash of Clans. Yet we at Dr. Panda believe that every type of game—even the most complex, intense, and hardcore titles on the market—can learn something from the way that children’s games are designed.

Over the last few years, we have developed dozens of children’s games under the Dr. Panda franchise, and we’d like to share the top lessons we have learned about designing games for young audiences that apply to games for older players as well.

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Allow room for discovery, expression, and exploration

Young children aren’t as goal-oriented as adults are. They have fun just playing around without needing a specific objective to give their play context or larger meaning. A big part of kids’ enjoyment of games lies in mastering a skill, exploring a new world, watching a story unfold, or simply expressing themselves. This type of gameplay lets kids use their imagination and creativity, which is so crucial to their growth and development at a young age.

While older kids and adults typically prefer to have some type of goal to strive for when playing games, you should allow room for discovery, expression, and open-ended exploration in their games as well. Many games for older audiences focus intensely on addictive mechanisms like point scoring and challenges, but we’d encourage these to also interject mechanisms—such as discovering shortcuts in Super Mario Bros. or exploring a whole new world in thatgamecompany’s Journey—in which players can engage with the game without the pressure of having to achieve a goal.

Keep the controls and the interface as simple as possible

Most kids’ motor skills are not that well developed when they first start playing games, and even if they were, children don’t have the experience to understand a complex set of controls or movements. So we have to make sure that the interface and controls for our games are as simple as possible to master. Our games must be accessible for kids as young as three years old, and we conduct an extensive amount of testing before any of our games are launched publicly. If there are areas where the kids get stuck or can’t intuitively understand how to do something, we go back to the drawing board.

Most games for older players—especially more casual games—would do well to follow this mantra. Players shouldn’t have to waste their time or energy trying to figure out how to play the game. At best, it’s frustrating. At worst they’ll stop playing the game altogether. But good, intuitive controls—without the sensory overload that too many adult games use—allow the player to succeed early on and start enjoying the game right away. (Some hardcore games may be exempt from this rule, as players actually want their motor skills to be challenged by complex execution.)

Focus on the game’s core mechanics

Kids’ minds work differently than adults, and they prefer to focus on just one thing at a time. This forces us as designers to really go to the core of a game and figure out what makes it so much fun. When designing Dr. Panda’s Swimming Pool, we had a ton of ideas for things that our players could do within each pool. But we realized that overwhelming them with too many activities was a distraction and took away from what we really wanted kids to do, which was use their imaginations to make up their own stories.

Many games today have become hybrids of various genres, mixing puzzle games with core game mechanics, for instance, or action-strategy games with more casual mechanics. This works okay in some cases, but more often than not it leads to game designs that are over cluttered.

Add sensory layers to the experience

Kids experience games much more with their senses than they do with their brains. For them, gaming is more of a sensory experience than a cognitive one, as opposed to the way that most adults experience games. Kids are stimulated by sounds, music and animations, which means that we have to layer these various inputs into the game. In Dr. Panda Mailman, kids can crash into crates and other objects, and they love hearing the crates smash into pieces and watching them fly everywhere.

As adults, we never really lose this love of sensory input. Too many games these days miss out on excellent opportunities to enhance their games through sounds, music, graphics, and other stimuli.

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Make your instructions clear, concise, and fun

As adults, we often figure out how to play a new game based on what we’ve learned from similar games in the past. We have a general sense of how the controls work, what we’re supposed to do at a certain point, where we’re supposed to go, and so on. But kids don’t have the same level of knowledge and experience to fall back on when learning how to play a new game. They also don’t have the language skills to read instructions on how to play a game.

We recommend making your tutorial and instructions as clear as possible, especially early on when players have yet to master the gameplay. The use of arrows, symbols, menus, and even submenus can help in this regard. In our game Dr. Panda Mailman, we implemented a feature where players learned to navigate through the game by simply following a small, friendly squirrel. This was the easiest way to guide them through the game, and also the most fun!

Have a purpose

We all want to have a purpose for the work we are doing. Our team gains inspiration from building games that help educate children about the world around them and by providing a rich, entertaining experience that evokes our player’s imaginations and curiosity.

Other game designers must find their mission as well. We all got into the business for some reason, beyond simply making money. Your mission might be to build the best RPG ever, to create mind-bending puzzle games, or simply to provide your audience with a few moments of entertainment in an otherwise hectic day. If you can find what it is that really inspires you and brings the most passion to your work, your games will reflect that.

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Whether your game is designed for teenaged boys or middle-aged women, there’s something to be learned by studying the techniques employed when designing games for children.

Thijs Bosma is the founder and chief executive officer of Dr. Panda, the largest independent developer of paid educational apps for children and the creator of the award-winning series of Dr. Panda games.