MindSnacks was a popular language learning app for iOS. I helped contribute in lots of ways to MindSnacks’s development (including an absurd amount of project management), but my favorite contribution was the design of the “metagame”. The MindSnacks apps (one for each of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, and German, as well as a US Geography app) were essentially collections of flash-card-esque minigames that could be played in short chunks. My goal with the metagame (i.e. the game-like experience within the app outside of the minigames) was to drive players to play different minigames, and generally stay with the app after typical drop-off points. To that end, I created over 80 different “quests” that challenged players to play the minigames in different ways, and balanced the various rewards for those quests to keep players on a steady cadence of success. I had a blast writing all of the wonderfully punny quest text.
