Gamifying Accounting: Transforming Numbers and Data into a Film Noir Experience

Jason Suriano

Published in

The Playbook

8 min readOct 24, 2022

Over the years, me and my team at TIQ Software have created a lot of custom eLearning projects.

One question I get a lot is which project were the most proud of.

We’ve worked with so many great customers that it’s difficult to choose but there’s one project that always stands out — The Accounted.

Overview

We started by defining our goals.

As a team, we wanted to do something innovative in the EdTech space

We outlined the following items…

Vision — use an existing game concept as inspiration.
Storyboard — create an original outline and script.
Design — use visual and sound design to show that this isn’t a typical learning module.
Platform — develop using our eLearning platform Trajectory IQ.
Partnership — find a customer that would take a calculated risk on something different.

Vision

One night I sat down and fired up my Xbox 360 to play L.A. Noire. I was instantly engaged in the design, music, and approach — it seemed familiar but different.

A few minutes in, the lead character walks into a shop to check his inventory.

The scene cuts to the evidence booklet which made me think of accounting.

I grabbed my laptop and started working on the pitch deck. On the first page of the deck I wrote:

“A 1940’s or 1950’s murder mystery with an accounting twist”

Next, I added the the box art as the inspiration to craft the game idea.

L.A. Noire — Box Art (via Rockstar Games)

Comparables

Next I researched several online and mobile apps that were pushing the boundaries in terms of content, style, and delivery.

A vocabulary game called Vocabador was one app that really stood out for its ease of use and creatively combining vocabulary training and lucha libre wrestling.

Curriculum

Because eLearning objects are always questioned for their legitimacy and academic rigour, it gets substantially more difficult when you start talking about a learning game.

Our team always works extremely hard to either write or find the appropriate subject matter experts for each game in order to ensure the curricular validity.

Luckily a friend of mine, Randy Troppmann, connected me with someone who literally wrote the book on accounting — a professor at Athabasca University named Tilly Jensen.

Ten years earlier, Tilly and Randy had worked on a concept for an accounting “app” on a Palm Pilot (yes, a Palm pilot) that looked like this:

Budget

Once we had the inspiration and the curriculum connection, I created a pitch deck with the hopes of landing a project partner and sponsor.

We were fortunate, through our partnership with Tilly, to land a presentation to CMA Alberta, who was enthusiastic about the project.

Here’s what one of the slides looked like:

Slide from our game concept/ pitch document

Name

To say this was tough was an understatement.

We batted around so many ideas but in the end the name had to have a refernece to both “accounting” and the idea of a “murder mystery.”

In the end, we settled on the name The Accounted which a lot of people assume is a play on Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (it’s not, but it’s a cool movie).

http://youtu.be/auYbpnEwBBg

Art

As usual, our team did a great job on the visuals for The Accounted.

The game attempted to trump the typical style that you see in every other eLearning object.

Because our team had created a lot of kids educational eLearning objects in the past, we knew The Accounted had to be different.

The Accounted needed to be fun but it had a different target audience in mind — young adults.

Design

After the characters and initial style were established, we followed our extensive wireframes to create the design for the game interface.

Audio

We spent a lot of time on audio in The Accounted. Normally we would source basic sound effects and ambient music but we decided to do something different (and custom).

We started looking at some specific music as inspiration, but this particular clip from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was the inspiration for the The Accounted.

Simple but creepy piano from Eyes Wide Shut

Technology

This is where it got interesting . . . we developed the entire game in Flash. Yes, that’s right, a game that we were deploying on iOS and Android was built completely in Flash. Crazy? Yup, but we did it anyway.

I can’t go into all of the details here, but the deployment through Adobe Air worked a lot better than we thought (it’s pretty seamless).

Not only were we taking a chance with the game style and game format in the education space, we decided to take a chance on the development.

Script

It was a challenge. 4 rewrites, mostly because the flow of information from story, to game, to accounting material.

1. Accounting — incorporating seven summary chapters of an accounting text book into a mobile format that would be fun but challenging for students prepping for an exam. Tilly did a phenomenal job helping us ensure all the curricular guidelines were met.

2. Flow — deciding on the sequence of story/ narrative, game/ puzzle and accounting interactive was difficult.

3. Blending — How would we tell the story? How are we going to layer an accounting item into each chapter of the story? There were no easy answers — this hadn’t been done before.

Dialogue

Deciding how to have the characters change dialogue in-scene posed some major challenges because of the way each person on the team visualized the character exchange.

Initially, we thought that Ace’s internal monolgues should be represented differently from the rest of the in-game character dialogue.

We looked at Capcom’s Ace Attorney and Telltale Games The Walking Dead as examples for inspiration.

Ace Attorney: Dialogue Scene (via Capcom)

The Walking Dead: Dialogue Scene (via Telltale Games)

The Accounted dialogue solution:

The color of the dialogue bar would change depending on if Ace was thinking (blue) or talking (tan)
We modified the pose of her bust from thinking (hand on face — pensive) to talking (arms to the side) as follows:

Tasks

Accounting Tasks

In the beginning our deveopers called for seven different accounting interactives to accommodate the subject matter.

The problem?

We didn’t have the time or budget to create seven separate accounting objects and the original Palm Pilot designs just didn’t work the way that I wanted them to.

This was by far the biggest challenge — how do you reflect various sections of accounting without changing the mechanics of the object?

I was headed to my parents place over a long weekend and sometimes the answers just fall out of the sky or in my case, show up in a junk filled basement . . .

As I was digging through a box labelled High School, I came across one of my Grade 10 accounting textbooks. One of the pages looked like this:

I started thinking . .. what if we could use a more traditional, textbook-like accounting format combined with the 40’s art style?

We could move the ledger lines and titles around, essentially modifying only the interface, without having to creating several different accounting interactives/ build objects.

After some discussions with the team, we came up with the following:

Once we had the design, we focused on a folder visual and a “reveal” concept (black horizontal bars) to ensure that it would fit the dimensions of a smartphone.

If the player got the question right, the ledger would show the answer, but if they got it wrong, the game wouldn’t disclose the answer and would move them to the next question in the sequence.

The final design looked like this:

The final design also forced the player to try again if they didn’t hit the minimum standard for success in the accounting interactive.

Working with Tilly, we made the level score the same passing grade or percentage you need to get into an accounting degree program at a Canadian University.