Garden Guardians °‧🌱⋆.࿔*:･
Role: Lead Artist & UX Designer
Medium: Procreate, Unreal Engine Fortnite, Figma
Hours spent: 15
Team members: 1
Project context: Fully Beyond Designathon 2024 - We placed 3rd! :>
Garden Guardians is an educational game designed to teach children about sustainability through interactive play. Developed during the 2024 Fully Beyond Designathon, the game encourages young players to plant virtual gardens, compost, clean up waste, and explore eco-friendly practices - all within a fun, low-pressure environment that fosters a love of nature and inspires real-world impact.
I designed and drew/modeled every asset and the background. In just 9 hours, my teammate and I built a fully interactive prototype in Figma, blending thoughtful UX design with custom art/assets and a game environment. We were honored to place 3rd overall in the competition.
⚘ Demo Video ⚘
✏️ My Role
I was responsible for all visual design, artwork, and environmental assets in the game, including:
Custom character and sprite design (hand-drawn in Procreate)
Building and designing the full in-game environment using Unreal Engine Fortnite
Designing interface elements, object interactions, and thematic illustrations
Crafting the game’s visual language to match the tone: playful, bright, and approachable for kids
Collaborating on storyline development and supporting integration into the Figma prototype
My teammate conducted user research and assembled the game flow in Figma, combining our assets into an interactive prototype.
🧩 What it Does
In Garden Guardians, players:
Plant and grow virtual gardens
Pick up trash and clean up their environment
Compost waste and learn why it matters
Harvest crops and explore the ecological benefits
Learn key sustainability principles while being engaged in the play aspect
Our design emphasizes agency, exploration, and care, helping children feel like real-world change-makers in a vibrant virtual space.
💡 The Inspiration for Our Project
Garden Guardians was sparked by a team conversation about how younger children learn best in today’s world. We reflected on how video games have become increasingly accessible and offer a powerful medium for self-paced, curiosity-driven learning.
Instead of dry, mandated digital modules, we envisioned a game where children could explore nature, sustainability, and responsibility through active play. We also felt a deep urgency to instill environmental awareness early, especially with shifting political climates and the global importance of climate education.
How We Kept Track of Our Work
A running Google doc with the prompt, ideas, research, user survey, user interviews, basic Figma mockups, the text plot/lines of the game, and a grading reference for UX/UI.
A Figma with both lo-fi and hi-fi iterations of our design
Multiple procreate files with assets
An Unreal Engine Fortnite file with environment
🔍 User Research and Interviews
To ensure Garden Guardians was engaging and age-appropriate, we conducted user research focused on children aged 8–12, drawing from both direct and indirect sources:
📚 Academic Literature Review: We reviewed studies and articles on game-based learning, cognitive development, and how children interact with sustainability topics in educational settings.
📊 Survey (n=20): We distributed a survey to 20 individuals (mostly older students and young adults) to reflect on their childhood experiences with educational games. This retrospective lens helped us identify which mechanics and themes felt natural and fun when they were younger.
👧 User Interview (Age 8): We conducted a one-on-one interview with an eight-year-old to gain insight into their gaming habits, preferences, and interests. This session helped us shape both the tone and visual style of the game. Notably, they expressed excitement about the possibility of “cooking” with the crops they grew, which we plan to incorporate in future iterations.
🎯 Value-Sensitive Design Reflection: While we couldn’t conduct extensive testing within the target age group, we actively considered children’s perspectives, needs, and values throughout the process. We aimed to empower, not lecture, and designed with an emphasis on agency, discovery, and environmental empathy rather than rigid goals or tests.
🌿 Findings
📊 Survey Insights
Our survey explored two main areas: (1) how much sustainability education participants received as children, and (2) what topics they believe are most important for kids to learn today.
🌍 Limited early education:
A striking 95% of participants reported having only “a little” or “some” exposure to sustainable practices or environmental education as children. Many shared that they didn’t learn about their ecological footprint until late high school or even college.
→ This reinforced our belief that Garden Guardians could help fill an early-education gap in a way that's fun and accessible.🐝 What matters most:
When asked to rank sustainability-related topics by importance, 45% of respondents gave “local pollinators” a 5/5. Composting, food systems, and waste reduction also ranked highly.
→ These results helped guide which in-game actions we included—like composting, planting, and cleaning up litter—and which we plan to expand in future versions.🎤 Tone and approach:
Participants emphasized the value of exploration-based learning, where kids can make their own discoveries instead of being quizzed or lectured. This led us to design an open-ended experience with gentle guidance instead of rigid levels.
🍓 Interview Highlights
We also conducted a one-on-one interview with an 8-year-old to better understand what excites players in our target demographic:
🎮 “Can I cook with the food I grow?”
The child was enthusiastic about the idea of harvesting crops and creating something with them, like recipes or meals.
→ This led to an idea for Part 2 of the game, where players could use what they grow to craft food, combining lessons in sustainability with creativity and systems thinking.🏡 Ownership and personalization:
They wanted to customize their garden, name plants, and design their space.
→ This supported our focus on player agency, helping them build a connection to their environment through expressive play.
We created user personas with the insights from the interview and survey. We made one persona for a teacher who could use the game as an educational tool and one for a student who could play the game during at-home education time! →
DESIGN PROCESS ⋆˚꩜｡
DESIGN PROCESS ⋆˚꩜｡
🖼️ 2. Low-Fidelity Prototyping in Figma
My teammate translated our sketches into a low-fidelity wireframe prototype using Figma to map out the user journey. This early version focused on screen flow, player choices, and how different tasks (e.g., watering plants, harvesting crops) would appear and progress.
We kept things simple here, allowing us to quickly test structure and pacing before investing time into visual polish. Key low-fi screens included:
Landing page
Garden setup screen
In-game task interface/characters
Educational pop-ups and messages
🎨 3. Asset & Sprite Creation in Procreate
Once our wireframes were solid, I began creating all the custom illustrations, characters, and assets using Procreate on iPad. I was fully responsible for the art direction and creation, including:
🐿️ Animal character sprites with friendly, approachable designs
🌱 Plant and crop illustrations at various growth stages
🐛 Interactive elements, like compost bins, trash piles, and bugs
🌸 Decorative assets to bring warmth and personality to the garden world
All assets were carefully designed to be clear, kid-friendly, and cohesive, with a bright, soft color palette and hand-drawn textures to feel inviting and playful.
🌄 4. Environment Building in Unreal Engine Fortnite (UEFN)
To bring the game world to life, I built one detailed environment in UEFN—a vibrant, interactive cityscape that serves as the backdrop for all gameplay activities. This environment includes buildings, trees, and urban elements carefully arranged to create an inviting space where players can explore gardening and sustainability tasks. Using a mix of public assets and custom placement, the city was designed to feel warm and accessible, providing clear zones for composting, trash clean-up, planting, and harvesting. This single, cohesive environment anchors the game experience and supports the immersive narrative of Garden Guardians.
🖌️ 5. High-Fidelity Prototyping in Figma
With all assets created, we returned to Figma to build a high-fidelity interactive prototype using the illustrations and environment scenes. My teammate lead this process. This version included:
Transitions between actions and mini-tasks
Hover effects and responsive elements
Final colors, icons, and text
Emotionally engaging animations using frame-by-frame storytelling
We placed all of our custom sprites and backgrounds into the flow, resulting in a clickable demo that showcased a full gameplay loop from planting seeds to harvesting crops and learning along the way.
📝 1. Ideation & Concept Sketching
We began by brainstorming what sustainability education could look like for children ages 8–12. Drawing from our survey and interview insights, we sketched early concepts of in-game actions like picking up trash, planting seeds, and composting, all performed by friendly animal characters to set a gentle, approachable tone.
These early hand-drawn sketches helped us think through interactions, aesthetics, and tone. We prioritized friendly characters, clear visuals, and settings that felt imaginative but grounded in real-world systems.
Our favorite frames :)
🌱Metrics of Success
📈 Adoption & Reach
How many people are playing Garden Guardians? Are parents, educators, or classrooms using it as a learning tool? Tracking downloads, shares, and active users helps us understand how widely the game is being adopted.
🐝 Sustainability Awareness
Using before-and-after surveys or in-game reflections, we assess how well players are learning concepts like composting, local pollinators, and ecological footprints—and whether they’re inspired to apply them in real life.
🎮 Engagement & Playtime
Are players enjoying and returning to the game? We track average session length, number of completed tasks, and replay frequency to evaluate how engaging and rewarding the gameplay is.
🎨 Creative & Visual Appeal
Since all characters, environments, and assets were custom-made, we measure feedback on the game's visual style and interactivity. We want the experience to be joyful, intuitive, and memorable for young learners.
🧱 Challenges
Working on Garden Guardians was both rewarding and a great learning experience. As a small team with ambitious goals, we faced several challenges—particularly around time, polish, and scope.
⏳ Scope & Time Management
We were excited about our concept and ended up setting goals that were a bit too big for the time we had. We learned the importance of scoping realistically and prioritizing core features early in the process to avoid last-minute rushes.
🧵 Visual Consistency
Balancing hand-drawn assets with the UEFN background came with some technical hurdles. There were moments where contrast or stylistic differences made the UI less readable. We had to revisit and revise several sprites and illustrations to make sure everything felt cohesive in the final prototype.
🦊 Limited User Testing
Due to time and resource constraints, we weren’t able to conduct as much real-time playtesting with children as we’d hoped. Most of our feedback came from retrospective surveys and one interview. In the future, we want to integrate more Value-Sensitive Design principles by involving users earlier and more often.
📚 What I Learned
Despite these challenges, we’re incredibly proud of what we built. We learned so much about game design, educational storytelling, and multidisciplinary tools.
I want to continue working in Unreal Engine and UEFN to build more immersive environments and polish my 3D design skills.
This project also deepened my interest in 2D illustration and character design, and I’m excited to create more expressive, educational game art.
Finally, we gained a better understanding of how to design experiences that blend learning and play, and how to approach environmental education through creative media.