Ani-ball Since the goal for this challenge was to design a game to evoke awe, we decided to evoke aww—so we designed a game that we would play, and that we thought was cute. The premise of the game is simple. You move a character (an animal) around a field and try to hit a ball back and forth with an opponent, not letting the ball touch the ground (like real volleyball, or pong). The game is simple and accessible—you can pull it out to occupy a few minutes anytime, or try to unlock more characters and get invested in the game. Where the “awe” part comes in is the superpowers—each animal has a themed superpower that you only discover by trying it out. These superpowers range from growing tall (like the giraffe in our demo) to growing big to becoming super fast. The idea is that these moments, in addition to scoring moments and character selection, would elicit delight from our players. We were inspired by a lot of the games that were popular in the early 2010s/early days of mobile gaming, such as Angry Birds and Doodle Jump, which similarly featured cute graphics and easy gameplay.
