Osy Osmosis
Well, it looks like I’ll be headed to the Game Education Summit this year, thanks to the NIH SEPA grant that I’m doing game design work for this summer. I’ll be bringing the latest build of Osy Osmosis [an early prototype build to the left] along with me. We should have our vertical slice completed by then and with any luck a build working on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is my hope to submit an NSF grant this summer to support my ongoing work on the project.
Work on the project is progressing well thus far thanks in large part to the artist and part time engineer working on the project. I’ve had to put my money where my mouth is as far as design goes, so we’ll see how that goes over the next couple of weeks and months. I think our vertical slice represents a pretty good sample of everything we’re attempting to put together for this game that happens to contain educational elements. I think it is a good example of what games with educational content could be. I shy away from calling it an educational game, because so often those games aren’t all that much fun. What I’ve attempted to do with this project is make the underlying game mechanics match up with real-world scientific processes. Instead of quizzing students though, we design the game such that “winning” requires that the player find and recognize that underlying model. We should be rolling this out to some teachers and students very soon as things move forward.
I suspect that in the end this particular component of the SEPA grant will hit a kind of 1St Playable state and remain there, as going into production and producing several levels for the game may not make sense. Perhaps it is an economic opportunity to take these kinds of 1st Playable pieces and flush them out, though I’m not sure who has time for that. 😉
Hey. Sounds like you’re doing some cool things. Can you say more about what the game will be like?
I’m going to slowly post more here as it comes together including how we went from our basic concept to the game ultimately. For those of you that have heard me talk about games creating the opportunity for players to get at “underlying systems and structures,” some of that will be pretty familiar. The game itself is “3D” insomuch as we’re using Unity 3D to create the game, but the play is 2D in style. In some ways I guess that the game borrows heavily on platformer and puzzle game mechanics with the overall goal being that players come to understand the process of osmosis and diffusion without being explicitly quizzed or told what it is they’re doing.
The game will make use of Unity’s ability to export a browser based build, a PC/Mac build, and a version for the iPhone/iPod Touch, though it will likely be somewhat different given the peculiarities and limitations of those platforms. We’ll see! Thanks for the interest, more soon.