Booeys: A Ghost’s Code

Game Metadata

Name: Booeys: A Ghost’s Code

Designer/Developer: Simcoach Games

Goal: The game helps to explore careers, practice basic job skills and earn badges to gain exposure to careers and training opportunities in your area.

🎮 Play it here!

Learning Objectives

Designed for ages 9+, at it’s core, Booeys is an arcade puzzle game. It has 37 levels (of which I made it to level 26 and plan to finish all of them.)

The game was developed with support from Partner 4 Work to demonstrate the link between gaming and future careers in technology. Booeys engages five aptitudes critical to technical careers:

Problem Solving
Logic
Attention to Detail
Understanding Algorithms
Ability to Conceive and Build a Solution

According to Simcaoch, these aptitudes play a big role in occupations such as computer programming, 3D printing, and quality assurance engineering.

To move beyond level 10, you’re required to make an account. The idea is to connect you with companies who’re looking to recruit people for jobs in the IT industry based on these skill levels.

Opportunities of transfer of knowledge

Through the different levels of increasing difficulty and multiple ways of finding a solution, the game beautifully mimics finding solution while coding.

From my limited knowledge of very basic coding to run projects using an Arduino, coding requires problem solving skills that would lead to an optimum solution. Debugging in coding also requires coders to have command over logically breaking down what each line of code is doing and analyze and fix it. Understanding algorithms allows a coder to write and review larger pieces of code and keep that code clean and organized. Finally, building solutions is a major part of what coders and programmers do on a daily basis. Coding is about seeing a problem and building a solution for that problem.

Game Elements

Mechanics and systems:

Let’s familiarize ourselves with some of the spooky and cute characters:

The Booey
The Lost
The Portal

The goal for each level is to help the Lost to reach the portal where they will rise up to the sky. (and teleport to the next level 👾)

The initial few levels are designed in a way to help the player familiarize themselves with the game and the interactions.

The player has to draw a line starting from the Booey and help the Lost find their way tot he portal. Sounds simple?

Well, as the player proceeds, the game starts to become more complex. New game objects in the forms of perils are introduced - water, fire, stones, bushes and sad Booeys. The player also finds out that the Lost are drawn to light (both from the Portal and the fire). The light from the portal is good, but the fore will burn the Lost to a crisp.

Once the player is done navigating between all the perils, they can hit play and hope for the best. This where you see the results of your thinking. I think, this is by far the most powerful mechanic in the game as it makes the player think about how might their solution pan out in the future which engages multiple thinking capabilities.

If they succeed, the Lost reach the portal and depart the world. If they fail, the Lost are drowned, turned to ash, splatted on the ground, or otherwise, just stay lost.

Once the player realizes they that this ain’t panning out as they thought it would they can always go and chnage the path as many times as they like.

In between levels, the spirited Booeys engage in some banter with the player. Frequently, Booeys send kids off to the sponsoring website to "get more information," which typically translates into giving contact information.

Game vocab:

Nouns: Booey, Lost, Portal, Fire, Water, Boulder, Bushes, Way, Play

Verbs: Navigate, Wayfinding, Extinguishing (fire), Building (a bridge using boulders)

Systems:

Once the Lost reaches the Portal with the help of the Booey, the player is taken to the next level.

Gameplay:

The core loop requires the player to think ahead and chart out a path for the Lost to reach the Portal.

Basic loop: Help the Lost reach the Portal while navigating all the perils.

Secondary Loop: The Lost are drawn to light. This leads to an immediate timer coming into play the moment the player hits play.

If a spot with Fire is in line of sight of the Lost, they’ll start walking towards that. The player has to find a way to either intercept the Lost, possess them and take them to the portal or extinguish the fire by using water.

Tertiary Loop: As the game proceeds, the player finds out that the Booey can possess material items like fire, water and boulder as well. If a Booey already has one of the other Game Objects in their possession, they will not be able to possess the Booey and might end up killing them instead.

After Level 25, another interesting mechanism is introduced. The game allows the player to arrange drop points by choice. While charting out a path for the Booey, the player can decide to “de-posses” some of the game objects at spaces they like by introducing markers in the the shape of a heart (unsure of why that shape was chosen.)

Player Experience:

There’s a sense of discovery as the player goes through each level. The increasing difficulty and delayed feedback really pushes the player to think the level through before hitting play.
The hints provided are VERY minimal. Maybe a little too minimal. They are designed around what “new” capability the Booey acquired in a new level. I think this is both good and bad in a way. It fails to build scaffolding in a way. What if the player is not able to figure out how to use that capability of the Booey, there is a chance that the player might give up. On the other hand, it does work really well, as it gives a small amount of new information - which helps the player tweak the path.
The elements of fantasy and a whole new terminology make it feel like a non-educational puzzle game. The desigers did an excellent job in not making it “chocolate covered broccoli”.

Learning Mechanisms

Scaffolding: The game has increasing complexity and introduces new capabilities in a layered and methodical approach. The hints in the game
Linking: The game components continue to become heavily linked as the player moves up the levels. The linking is a key factor here as the Booey gets more powerful and has the ability to possess and de-possess game objects.
Feedback: On making a mistake, the player can only find out about it once they hit play. The delayed feedback here works because the player gets to see the error and its consequences pan out.
Coherence: Right from the beginning, the levels are designed in a way where only basic information in easy to understand language is provided before the level starts. There are no words, sounds, text in the level that increase the cognitive load during the level.
Metacognition: The game is designed in a way that the player gets to know the result only after charting the path and hitting play - which can be done multiple times. This allows for a time to self-reflect on the strategies used and modify them.
Questioning: Because the player is allowed t change the path as many times ad they want, the game allows for enough time to question and figure out what went wrong.

Will these work?

The delayed feedback and the metacognition and questioning work very well together. Each level allows for tweaking of strategies, applying different kind of reasoning and a chance to using the game objects

I am not too sure about the scaffolding. There was an opportuity in building for more scaffolding for the clues - particularly for the people who might have a tendency to give up if they can’t figure out a level on a particular amount of time and never come back to the game again.