Elena Reinertz
© Elena Reinertz

Meister Cody KIDS

Serious game for kids aged 4-7

Android & Apple // tablets & phones


— PROJECT NAME

Meister Cody KIDS


— ROLE

Art Director


— ENGINE

Unity 3D


— MY TOOLS

Procreate

Affinity Designer

Figma

Spine2D

Adobe Premiere

InDesign

Canva


— RELEASE

April 2025


— PARTNERS

TU Dortmund

Psychometrica


— LINKS

App Store

Google Play

Meister Cody

My Contribution

  • • Art direction and visual style development
  • • UI/UX design and gameplay flows
  • • Concept and design of language, math and logic mini-games
  • • Storyboarding, illustration and animation of cutscenes
  • • Collaboration with educational researchers and developers
  • • Creation of marketing assets and app store materials

Project Description

Meister Cody KIDS is a learning app for preschool and first-grade children that supports early development in language, mathematics, and logical thinking. I led the visual design, UI/UX design, game design, and overall concept development, working closely with educational researchers and experts to translate their research and ideas into engaging gameplay.


Developing Meister Cody KIDS meant bringing together several existing ideas and systems. A previously developed logic training tool, an early concept for a language learning game, and a completely new set of math mini-games had to be merged into one product that felt cohesive and accessible for young players.


In collaboration with TU Dortmund, we also developed a math screener for preschool children to assess their proficiency level. The screener will later allow the math games to automatically adjust their starting difficulty.


Together with the team, I helped realize five language games and seven math games, each with multiple difficulty levels and different visual variations, as well as around 119 short logic puzzle games. I storyboarded, illustrated, and helped animate the cutscenes, and worked with the development team to implement parameter-driven gameplay animations.


In addition, I was responsible for the app store presence, including screenshots and promotional assets. I also created marketing materials such as flyers, roll-ups, Instagram posts and stories, informational content for schools and kindergartens, the project logo, and the production of the official trailer.

Background illustrations

This was the largest project where I was responsible not only for defining the art style but also for creating a significant amount of illustrative work. Here are a few examples of the illustrations I created:

Since we feature real historic personalities in our app, I enjoyed researching their lives and finding real locations to use as backgrounds for the cutscenes. In this case, I was excited to discover that Friedrich Schiller’s study in Weimar has been preserved and could serve as an authentic setting.

Background illustration of the Zugspitze.

Screen & Game Design

Part of my work involved reworking over a 100 existing learning games; not only visually, but also in terms of interaction and overall usability. Many of these games are based on validated scientific methods, so the underlying learning goals need to remain intact. This means finding a balance: improving visuals and accessibility without changing what makes the task meaningful from a research perspective.


To do this, I always needed to spend time understanding the researchers’ work, so the visual and gameplay adjustments stay true to the original concept.

One example is this logic task. The original version asked children to sort pictures of people by gender. In my rework, children sort cats and dogs instead. The core skill, recognizing similarities and differences, stays the same, but the new setting feels more playful and inclusive. The interaction was also adapted from mouse-and-keyboard input to touch.

Animations

Some of the animations I’ve made in Spine2D. I was also responsible for rigging and skinning all the characters in the game for our animator, as well as setting up the animation pipeline.

Trailer and Screenshots