The Lieutenant
The Lieutenant
2018
Unity© game engine
The Team
Laid out the learning goals, wireframe and basic game play. Wrote game text and kept the team on track.
Alexia Schill
Created backgrounds, sprites, animations, and UI assets.
Wrote code for game mechanics.
Purpose
Student project as part of the Biomedical Visualization graduate program’s Interactive course. We created a game aimed at middle school children that taught concepts of symbiosis, specifically mutualism, using the acacia tree and the ants that live on them as an example case. Game play focuses on resource management, where the player has to feed their queen, and themselves, in order to dig out a home, defend the tree, and add more ants to the colony. By engaging the player with these overlapping tasks, they gain an appreciation for the interconnection between organisms in nature.
Story elements were added to add a sense of investment that we hoped would aid in retention of the learning goals
So many happy ant babies!
My Role
The main mechanics of the game focus on collecting items that are used to complete tasks and maintain the status of important non-player entities. I worked closely with the game designer to balance how difficult the game would be, versus the amount of information we wanted the game to teach. The process of developing this game emphasized the importance of using both audio cues, and visual cues in the players normal line of sight, to guide them to the next step or to solving a complication that would cause them to lose.
