Case study · Bad Dinosaurs
Leading a Netflix Launch Title
Oversaw design on Bad Dinosaurs for Netflix Playground, keeping it playable for pre-readers.
The game
Bad Dinosaurs is a launch title for Netflix Playground, Netflix’s games destination made exclusively for children eight and under.
- Role
- Lead Game Designer
- Date
- 2025 – 2026
- Team
- 1 designer, 1 artist, 1 engineer and 1 QA, with me as lead. I decided what to change and what to keep, reviewed the work, and held it to Netflix’s launch bar.
- Skills
- Design Direction
- Team Leadership
- Game Design
- Child-Centred Design
- Accessibility
- Cross-Discipline Collaboration
- Documentation
- Tools
- Unity
- Figma
- FigJam
- Confluence
The challenge
Bad Dinosaurs came with a design document. Our job was to build it, find what it didn’t answer, and adjust what didn’t work, for an audience where most of them can’t read yet.
Designing Bad Dinosaurs
The document told us what Bad Dinosaurs should be but not how a three-year-old holds a tablet or how an activity feels on the twentieth replay. I read through looking for gaps and questions the team needed answered before building.
Children eight and under can’t read or follow tutorials. Everything we added had to teach itself: big touch targets, one clear action at a time, visual feedback that rewards exploration. No fail states that discourage them, no dead ends they can’t escape.
Bad Dinosaurs is a set of activities a child can move between freely. The runner has one oversized pause button. The music maker has a turntable, keyboard and sound effects (fart noises included).
Sending the Runner Back
Testing the final build, the obstacles in the runner sat too close together and the whole thing played too hard for children eight and under. I asked the designer to retune it: space the obstacles out and bring the difficulty down. Everything else in the game is built so a young child can’t get stuck or discouraged, and a runner that keeps beating them undoes that before any of the rest of it gets a chance. It went back in retuned ahead of launch.
What Shipped
Bad Dinosaurs launched with Netflix Playground in April 2026 as activities a young child can pick up alone, offline, with no ads or purchases.