They build it before they play it
Designing the dungeon is the reward, and the pieces you have unlocked are the progression. Kids build a thing and then have to beat their own thing.
what I'm building / Math Dungeon
Kids design their own dungeon, then walk through it in first person. Every trap is a maths puzzle. The maths is the game rather than a quiz bolted onto one, and grown-ups decide whether the working shows on screen or stays out of sight.
Why it's interesting
Designing the dungeon is the reward, and the pieces you have unlocked are the progression. Kids build a thing and then have to beat their own thing.
Balancers, number bonds, place value. Solving is how you get through the door, not a screen that interrupts the game to test you.
A parent or teacher chooses whether the maths appears on screen. Left off, a kid plays a dungeon game. Turned on, an adult can see exactly which skill each trap exercised.
No kid accounts, no cloud saves, no analytics on the player. Local saves only, which keeps a children's product out of the way of the rules that govern children's data.
How I built it
The design rule is that the maths must never feel like an interruption. The moment a puzzle reads as a test, the game stops being a game, and a kid who wanted to play a dungeon crawler notices they are doing homework.
No kid accounts was an architecture decision rather than a feature decision, and it had to be made on day one. A children's product that collects personal data pulls in a stack of obligations, and retrofitting local-only storage after building around cloud saves is a rewrite rather than a patch.
Aimed at parents and homeschoolers first, deliberately. One person is the buyer, the teacher and the curriculum decision maker, with no procurement to get through, which makes it the only education market a solo builder can actually reach.
See it
Next step
One email a week: what shipped, what's next, and what's happening.