Game Design in Houston Texas: The Monarch School

Games
Animation
Web

ONLY IN HOUSTON
We're working with the OiH Board of Directors to design and launch a new community website for the organization. Only in Houston is a non-profit entity with more than 800 members who work in advertising, marketing, public relations, graphic design, production, and other creative industries.

LOGIX COMMUNICATIONS
Our team recently began on an all new LOGIX Communications website. Bouncing Pixel was brought on board by Lou Congelio of ACME Fish to introduce the new LOGIX brand to the web and to the world.

BOTL.com
This social community start-up selected our studio to design and develop its website, online strategy, brand identity, and to facilitate a new product release for its social media venue. The site will help users create visually stimulating messages and set them afloat in an online community.

RICE UNIVERSITY
Our game development team is working closely with researchers at Rice's Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning to create online educational games. Rice is using the games to increase students' science and health knowledge and to inspire those students to pursue science related careers.

GRAMMAROPOLIS
Education startup Grammaropolis chose Bouncing Pixel for website redesign and the development of its next mobile app. The website will feature animated episodes, books, songs, and games. Grammaropolis is a fresh, fun, and exciting new way to learn about the parts of speech.

TEXCORP MORTGAGE BANKERS
Our web geniuses are following up on Jerald's ten-year effort that made Texcorp's specialty mortgage websites stand out from the crowd. We're employing everything we know about SEO, user experience, social media, and lead generation to keep these sites on top.

The Monarch School

'Heroes of Gardevioria' Video Game Mentoring Project

play the game

Jon was given the opportunity to volunteer in a computer game club at the Monarch School, a school for students with neurological differences. He started to volunteer in October when Bouncing Pixel was still forming, and shortly after found it trivial to get Mckee excited about volunteering as well. Which is good because Jon is horrible at everything artistic. Together they set out with a goal of taking the students in the club through the process of making a video game.

Once a week (with a few exceptions, sometimes work would get in the way) they went to the school. The students started by proposing game ideas that they wanted to see created. The ideas were refined and eventually narrowed down into one type of game. A medieval game. From there they talked about what type of gameplay would work best and settled on a top-down turn-based game. Once those details were agreed upon the story was fleshed out more with a common core being developed that each student could create a quest around. They created maps, came up with character concepts, names, drawings, and dialog for their quests. They helped each other out when they ran into trouble or needed ideas.

Jon and Mckee helped guide the students through the process but left the decisions up to the students. The programming was done by Jon, Mckee digitized the artwork and filled in any small gaps in assets where there was not time in the club for the students to finish. Everything got cleaned up and the game was finished as-is at the beginning of May.

We would like to thank the other partners of Bouncing Pixel for encouraging this sort of behavior, the Monarch School for the opportunity to work with the students, Laura Rosenbaum and the other teachers for helping us with everything we needed, and especially the students ( Khalid Al-Alawi, Anthony Grichuk, Riley Simpson, Jacob Lower, Stevo Broussard, Nathan Schwabenland, Edward Ramos, Sam Johnson ) for putting up with us and working hard throughout the school year.

We had a great time and hope that everyone enjoys the game!

Bring it on-eth!
Knave.

-- Jon and Mckee