Feed the Monster | Game Design Refresh

Home screen for Feed the Monster. It features the main monster character, a smiling yellow beast with horns, a lightning bolt pattern on its torso, and a magnet in hand.
Screencap of the gameplay in Feed the Monster. The game prompts the player to find a specific letter. There are several brightly colored stones floating around the monster in its egg form.
Screencap of the results after a level is played. The second stage of the monster, a baby version of the same smiling yellow monster, is jumping for joy out of its broken egg shell as the game shows the player earned two stars.
Home screen for Feed the Monster. It features the main monster character, a smiling yellow beast with horns, a lightning bolt pattern on its torso, and a magnet in hand.
Screencap of the gameplay in Feed the Monster. The game prompts the player to find a specific letter. There are several brightly colored stones floating around the monster in its egg form.
Screencap of the results after a level is played. The second stage of the monster, a baby version of the same smiling yellow monster, is jumping for joy out of its broken egg shell as the game shows the player earned two stars.

About Feed the Monster

Feed the Monster, one of several featured games on the Curious Reader app, is an interactive platform designed to guide your child through the basics of reading. Through engaging gameplay, kids learn to recognize letters, spell, and read words, boosting their school performance and preparing them to read simple text.

This free app makes learning to read fun and empowering by providing interactive tools and resources that encourage children to explore, discover, and learn at their own pace. As a learning app, it includes a variety of games and books allowing children to choose their own learning paths and enhance their literacy journey.

Created by literacy nonprofits Curious Learning and Sutara, Curious Reader ensures a fun and effective learning experience.

Character Designs

Image of the second stage of the monster. The round yellow monster is smiling at the user with the lower half of its body covered by the broken egg shell it sits in. This design heavily features gradients and shadows to give it a 3D effect.
Image of the second stage of the monster. The round yellow monster is smiling at the user with the lower half of its body covered by the broken egg shell it sits in. This design is flatter with solid color vectors

The two main goals of the game assets’ redesign were:

  1. Give the game a welcoming, refreshed feel to fit with more current trends
  2. Lower the space that the game needs to occupy on users’ device because Curious Learner’s core audience plays the game from phones and tablets with minimal storage space and downloads over slower internet connections

To do this, I kept as faithful as possible to the original designs while simplifying the new designs. This meant working in a 2D vector style that favors solid fills over gradients, checking that objects use as few anchor points as possible, and removing unnecessary elements like the “lip” of the egg shell that gave it a 3D effect.

While the orange bottom of the eggshell gave a greater contrast to the monster’s yellow body in the original design, I opted for yellow to keep the monsters’ color palettes from distracting users from the gameplay. Although we hope the children playing this game to be interested in the monsters they’re feeding and want to help them grow, we want their attention primarily on the prompts.

Background Designs

Stage 1 monster with the stage 1 background
Stage 2 monster with the stage 2 background
Stage 3 monster with the stage 3 background
Stage 4 monster with the stage 4 background

The idea with the backgrounds for the monster was that it would grow with it. Therefore, the tree starts as a sapling, and the mushroom house starts out shorter with only one window. By the final stage, the tree is fully grown with its leaves filled out, and the house has gained a window, a chimney, and more texture through bricks on the body and spots on the roof.

UI Designs

Screencap of Feed the Monster during gameplay, featuring the old UI elements
Screencap of Feed the Monster during gameplay, featuring the new UI elements

Similarly to the monster character designs, the UI element designs have a flat vector style, but the difference is that the color palette could be more vibrant as these are the main focus of the game. The berries that the user feeds the monster are a bright magenta to signal these are what they should interact with. The timer bar is red to stand out against blue sky background.

The primary change I made was with the buttons (i.e. the pause button in these screencaps) and star bar. Originally, both had a swirled stripe background, but I muted those on the buttons and removed it entire on the stars bar so that their purpose would be more legible.

Skills

Tools