Sylla-Sling
Level Designer/System Designer | Team of 5 | Spring 2022
Sylla-Sling is a simple top down puzzle game for 1st to 3rd graders that helps them understand what it is like to read with dyslexia. The player must help the character finish his book by breaking down difficult words into syllables and then arranging them so they can be easily read. The intent is to not only show what difficulties a child with dyslexia may face but to show that they have the tools to work through it.
This project came about as part of the Studio program at Champlain college, specifically the class Studio 1, was worked on over the course of a month. The assignment was for each team in the class to create an educational game that would teach younger players about something meaningful. We decided to make a game that brought awareness and education to the topic of Dyslexia, as we felt it was not talked about much, or even understood.
As a Designer on this project, my responsibilities included:
- Documentation of mechanics and levels
- Creation and implementation of levels
- Research into methods that people diagnosed with dyslexia commonly employ
Game Summary
Sylla-Sling is a simple top down puzzle game for 1st to 3rd graders that helps them understand what it is like to read with dyslexia. The player must help the character finish his book by breaking down difficult words into syllables and then arranging them so they can be easily read. The intent is to not only show what difficulties a child with dyslexia may face but to show that they have the tools to work through it.
The player takes the role of Thomas, a 3rd grade student with dyslexia, who is trying to read through a book for class. When he comes across a word he has trouble with he employs the Slingerland method, breaking the word down into syllables and then writing those syllables down in his notebook. The player then controls a drawing of Thomas as he imagines himself in his notebook, moving the syllables around to form a coherent word. As the player moves through the level, they see how a student with dyslexia reads. By breaking down the words into syllables, and then reading them one at a time to form the whole word.
The player's primary motivation is strategy, the player has to think ahead and plan out their moves in order to complete each level. The secondary motivation is completion, the scoring system means that in order to get a high score the player has to complete a level in a certain number of moves. This means that a player may be going back to complete a level with a different approach to get a higher score overall. The tertiary motivation is competition, this is less due to the literal design of the game and more due to the most common way this game will likely be played. Since it will likely be played in a classroom setting by students, players will be motivated to get a higher score on each level or page than their fellow students.
Technical
Sylla-Sling was developed in Unity, making use of Git version control to manage the project. The team kept up with Agile practices using Redmine as our project manager. We had frequent team meetings to stay on course, as well as constant research to ensure we properly portrayed how dyslexia affects an individual, as well as some of the methods to combat it as someone with dyslexia.
My Role
As a designer on this team, I handled a lot of documentation and research, as well as documentation of and creation of levels. We researched which words were commonly misread by those with dyslexia, and took some of the leading ones to make levels out of.
Some words we made into levels are: Mechanic, Perpetual, and Luxurious. Once we used the Slingerland method to adequately dismantle the word, I took the different blocks that it was made up of (the different syllables and bits) and scattered them around the level strategically to be difficult to fit back together. I made use of immovable barrier blocks to make it more difficult to push the word back into proper order. While this created the existence of some soft-locks, players could simply restart if they got stuck, and learn from the experience. With that done, the levels were ready to be reassembled into actual words again by the players using strategy and the Slingerland method.