Rosetta Stone’s Fit Brains

Fit Brains Trainer is an award-winning personalized game library that challenges your brain’s various cognitive and emotional functionalities. The library contains 60+ games, can generate 500+ workout sessions, and provides in-depth performance reports. It is available on a wide variety of mobile devices and was featured on the devices in Apple Stores across the world.

This game library has been discontinued.

Rebalancing the Fit Brains for Apple TV

My first task as a designer was to balance a collection of games that would be ported to the Apple TV. We received a launch exclusively with Apple for the platform, which made the project time-sensitive. 

The challenge of the balancing came from a change of player input. Our games were designed to be played on a touch screen, and the controller for the TV offered two analog buttons. Difficulty curves and user experience needed to be redesigned to accommodate this. I found a solution by comparing scores from the iPhone and TV versions, then seeing the differences between the scores and rebalancing the difficulty of the TV games accordingly. This was my first launched title at Rosetta Stone.

Created and maintained a wiki

I began these tasks after clearing my probation period. Afterwards, I had a full comprehension of our game. I then used this familiarity to establish a wiki for our games. I detailed how each of the games worked and what parts of the brain they trained. I also included release notes so we could track critical changes which could affect our research data.

Creating a pipeline for a massive art update

Our library contained over 60 games, each of which needed new art. Throughout this project, I worked with our outsourced graphics team 5 Minutes and our internal development team to establish a pipeline that would take the art from the Adobe Illustrator files and resize them to the various dimensions that the programmers required.

Quality Assurance for the restructuring of our Android port

Once we updated all of the art on the IOS version of our game, we decided we should also update the Android port of our game. This required an entire overhaul of the game and extensive quality assurance testing to optimize performance and ensure that the user experience was unaltered during the porting.

The most valuable lessons I learned from working on this project involved framing my game design methodologies through the context of challenging emotional and cognitive intelligence. This may seem rudimentary, as these two things are the foundation of all video games, but it was the context in which I executed them which was valuable. This was my first paid design position, and in many ways, it cemented my foundational knowledge of creating and teaching game literacy. 

The audience of Fit Brains is not a group that is well versed in the language of play. For many of them, this is their only formal experience with game systems. Providing games that challenge emotional intelligence within the constraints of basic game literacy was an enriching experience.

Analyzing the effects of brain training games on wounded veterans

Outside of the free market, Fit Brains is used by the American Military. American veterans recovering from brain injuries in Head Trauma Wards play the games we develop to recover their cognitive abilities. I worked with doctors from these wards to report on the benefits of Brain Fitness games on the recovery of soldiers.

In The Media

A Workout for Your Brain, on Your Smartphone – The New York Times

Maintain Your Memory With Brain Fitness Games – mashable.com