Project Brief
This project chronicles the development of a physical maze toy over the course of a year, starting with a childhood pencil-box game and ending with a small, difficult product. In order to produce an entertaining game for a broad age range, it concentrates on iterative concept development, user testing, and manufacturing constraints.
Type
Internship | January 2023 - December 2023 | Jim N Jam | Solo
How a childhood game inspired the creation of an innovative, challenging, and engaging maze toy for all ages.
About the Project
I joined Jim N Jam as an intern to assist in conceptualizing a range of upcoming toys over the course of a year. During my time there, I contributed to numerous projects, each different from the others. My work involved designing toys from scratch, continuing development on ideas left in the ideation phase, making improvements to existing concepts, and handling branding and packaging for various toys.
In this case study, I will discuss one toy project that took nearly a year from start to finish. I was the sole designer responsible for overseeing this project, but I collaborated with several key individuals along the way:
Company Owner: To understand the whole scope of the projects and its requirements. What age group needed to be targeted as the toy we were creating was a bit open for all the age groups.
Manufacturers: Understanding the requirement of the size of the product in which it can be manufactured in and also what different materials can be used to cut the cost.
Children: To ensure that the game was competitive enough to keep the kids engaged for as long as possible .
About the Company
Jim N Jam produces sustainable toys with a Montessori based approach and mostly like to focus on open ended play. The company mostly produces toys for 2–6 years old kids of age group.
The Maze Idea
So all whole intimal idea came from the plastic pencil box which had the maze game on top the box that we used to have as kids. We tried to note some problems from the game too like
when you reach the ending point you don’t directly reach the starting point
the maze has a definitive shape which gets repetitive for kids
after a while the kid can easily reach the destination
there is no storytelling in the whole journey to reach the destination
First Concept (Creating the maze from scratch)
Idea was to let the kids create the maze from the scratch and then they go forward and play. This acts as a puzzle too. But the problem with this was that the maze did not have any variation where you can create different patterns for the pathways.
Like the kid should be able to create different patterns with in the given area and then he can continue to play the game. That would help to help create more and more variations in them game and trying to find a solution to all of them.
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So now I tried to create a different variation where there is no finite amount of insertions and you are allowed to create all different kinds of patterns as your want. The shapes that we are getting would have 3–4 finite shapes of course but the variations you can create with them would be a lot more than before.
This failed too cause manufacturing them was not possible cause of how small the pieces were. Plus also we would have to make it way precise for every single part to fit in perfectly and not be loose in some or the other sections.
Second Concept (Adding hollows)
So we tried to go back to the old concept but tried to add hollows in the game which would increase the difficulty of the game and also the kid can start from the beginning no matter where the ball ends. We tried to ideate with different patterns.
After a lot ideation the major problem that I faced was that the maze path was feeling smaller and the size of the maze was bigger. We wanted to make the maze game as engaging as possible and also portable so that its travel friendly as well but the way we were going in was not correct.
Third Concept (Loop)
Now our first goal was to increase the length of the path within the maze and the only way we saw was to make it into a loop inside the given space as it covered the most area.
But then the problem was it was the same maze and a boring loop so we tried to add a lot of hollows plus barriers to increase the difficulty so that it more rewarding of the user when he/she reaches the goal.
To make the toy attractive for even more kids we tried too add a story elements to the toy. We tried to make into a pirate story by adding bunch on stickers to each hole acting as a trap until it reaches the final hole which is the treasure. Also other problem we faced was we wanted to keep the ball/marble inside the ball only cause that way it wont be lost or even if a small kid is playing with it he won’t eat it or anything.
Also I realized the size was still too big cause it was 215x215mm and the kid was barely able to control the ball when playing with it and without a acrylic layer he would just pick up the ball sometimes and keep it at the starting point.
Why this concept failed?
Size was too big to play with which did not allow the user to control the ball properly to where they wanted to take it.
Target audience was too narrowed, considering the way we added stickers.
The ball was no staying inside the maze which would make the user lose it at some point.
It was not travel friendly.
The Last Concept
Since we knew we had to needed even a smaller version we reduced the size to 125x110mm. You must be wondering why 15m got increased on the other side? Its because of an additional feature that allows the ball to stay inside the the maze whole time while bringing it to the starting point after it drops into the hole. The acrylic sheet on top will always keep the ball inside.
Now obviously we had to remove the story aspect cause of the smaller size of the toy and we could not even have different types of variation of pathways in the same maze, but we tried to replace it with increase in the difficulty level and targeting wider age group with that.
You had to be really precise to reach the goal considering all the obstacles it had cause one mistake can bring you back to the starting point and that’s what made it a challenging game.
The product was divided into 4 layers — (1) the base, (2) the hollow part through which the ball will move, (3)the third is which has the holes in it. (4) the loop part with barriers and also we cannot forget about the acrylic sheet.
We had tried different color variations too check which can be best suited for the branding of the product. The challenging part was to decide which material to use for the product to give a premium feel to it.
We had tried different color variations too check which can be best suited for the branding of the product. The challenging part was to decide which material to use for the product to give a premium feel to it.
Impact
We had tested the product with lot of people and it was working for all the age groups as we targeted later when we change the design. It was keeping them engaged for a lot of time considering the difficulty of the game and how they wanted to reach the goal no matter what.
Some were calling this the impossible maze and some were kept playing the game for 15–20 mins to come close to the final goal. Kids were also enjoying the game a lot considering how fast they had to reach every time they had to dodge the pot holes.
In the first batch we decided to manufacture 150 of these toys.
That’s the End!
During this project I developed my design process and learnt that each project or even iteration presents its own iteration. I came to understand that it involves a cycle of feedback and iteration to refine and remove the design.
Through this experience, I got the confidence to look at any problem with logical reasoning, keeping the user in mind and keep on iterating until the final usable product is developed.
