Mobile Game Development for Kids: Privacy

Developing apps for children is a delicate, difficult, but rewarding process. We’ve already discussed our reasons for doing so in our Why Create Kids Games?blog post. It is a wonderfully challenging experience – one that can re-open your eyes to the joys of childhood all over again, while battering your adult mind with agonizing questions like:

• Is this easy enough? Challenging enough?
• How do you communicate “exit” vs “quit” to non-reading kids with a small icon?
• Are there enough strong female characters?
• Are the Gummies cute enough to be considered friends but strong enough to be taken as mentors?

We really did consider all of those questions, among hundreds more. When designing for a children’s app, you have to consider non-readers, inexperience with classic game types, controls and flow, how to present content so that it’s intuitive, how to teach game mechanics through visual or audio means, but most importantly in our minds, was how to keep children safe and parents comfortable with allowing their kids to play our game.

There are several resources out there for developers and parents to determine which games are good educational quality, what permissions an app requests, and guidelines to develop to. Among these are:

• MOMs with Apps
• App Trust Project
• The Children’s App Manifesto
• App Trust Project
• Appy Smarts
• Fingerprint

We followed these guidelines and became members of these sites, but

Erik and I love the challenges – and the fulfillment – that comes from developing kids games.