The broccoli incident of '11

Monster Line is our second control game. It was all about solving equations, but in mental math kind of way.

I actually like this mechanic quite a bit. There are monsters attacking your city. It's up to the player to use math to aim his towers to hit the monsters. Since all the things in the game live on the number line, the player just has to enter the number that will get the turret to hit the monsters number. It's essentially an algebra problem: 5+x=32. The player enters the number and fires. After all the towers have been fired, the monsters march a little closer to the city center.

Originally it would randomly generate levels, but you'd occasionally get one that couldn't be won. I nerfed the level generator a bit so all the levels can be beaten and called that endless mode. We also let our math experts script the initial setup in XML. The game reads those XML files and makes the levels in the game. We have some vicious math experts, and thus some pretty vicious levels.

Again, we'll see how this one performs since we didn't have time to test out the math content first. In case you're wondering, the broccoli incident relates to debate about what the towers should shoot at the monsters. For political reasons, we couldn't use broccoli.

Are you ready to AlgebROCK!?!

About 6 weeks ago, we found out that our big efficacy trial (60 classes of 35 kids spread all over the country) was in trouble. We had the games made for our treatment condition (games that teach fractions), but our plan for getting control games (math games that didn't use fractions) fell apart. So we had 6 weeks to make 2 games from scratch. Since these are going to be control games, we don't actually care if kids learn anything from them. Well, I care, but it's not as critical as it is for the treatment games.

Our first control game is AlgebROCK. It's a puzzle platformer where you're trying to collect musical instruments from evil robots so you can compete in an intergalactic battle of the bands. This game has a pretty hard line separation of game and math. You run around until you get to a control panel or do you need to open. You have to hack it open by solving an algebraic equation. The lack of math-game integration is sort of a downer, but it does let us put the math right in the kids face. We'll see how it performs.

As a side note, we really only managed to get this game turned around in time because Unity made it so easy to layout the levels. Here's a shot of the editor for one of the levels.

Jonesing for some math

Having come up with what we thought was a sure-fire way to make a game that actually teaches (see Rosie's Rates), we thought we'd use that same technique on our bread and butter topic, fractions.

We went out, did the worksheet, and then came up with a game around it. This one was actually a lot of fun. We did it all in 2D, and wrote up a story about Wiki Jones, Safety Patrol Investigator. He uses math to bust a bunch of criminals who are selling fake bacon (facon) to kids at his school. I love the art in this game. I just had to rough out a sketch on the white board and our super talented illustrator would make it gorgeous.

A change in the winds

After seeing the third or fourth math game we made come back from a study that showed no significant learning for the kids, I had a revelation.

If you want to make a game that teaches kids, you have to make sure that the content in the game can teach kids without the game.

It might seem sort of obvious, but that was never really a part of how we were making games. We all assumed that because our math experts were experts (they are actually quite good at teaching math), they would be able to work with the game designers to make good math games. What actually happens is that the math teachers and the game designers both constantly compromise to try and meet the other groups goals. For our next game, I asked for a little change in direction.

Our math experts would come up with a topic they wanted to teach. They'd go out and make a worksheet that teaches that topic. Kids would do the worksheet, and we'd see what they learned. It actually took 4 revisions of the worksheet before we saw reasonable learning. Then I got our game folks together and we made a game out of it.

Thus was born Rosie's Rates. It's not a great game (it's very pedantic) and kind of boring, but it TEACHES KIDS! They're actually less critical of it than I am (I hear it's more fun than their textbooks). This is the game that proved we now know how to make teaching games. Pretty heady stuff.

Last Port of Call

And then there was Tlaloc's Book. Funny story, the person who named the game absolutely hated the project, and may have wanted to kill it with an unpronounceable name. The name stuck despite nobody actually liking it, or being able to say it out loud.

Tlaloc's Book is another Unity port of a game developed by a contractor. They originally created it in Flash. After trying to play the original version, I found it was so broken that I don't think I ever even looked at the original source code. I'm not sure what they were using for physics there, but it was absolutely insane. We ended up just looking at the original levels and replicating all the functionality from scratch in Unity. We were actually able to reuse all but two of the characters from one of our other games (see Puppetman below). That saved me quite a bit of time modeling, and rigging, but I had to do a different set of animations. I actually had a pretty good time on some of the 3d work for this one.

Puppetman never dies

So the flagship game of our research project was about fractions. It was designed in collaboration with USC (fight on) and our research folks (go Bruins). Shockingly enough, that didn't work out so well. It wasn't a school rivalry issue so much as a tension between the objectives of the educators and the game designers. In the end, both sides lost and the game was pretty broken.

Sadly, it was our research platform for a bunch of studies, so we had to rebuild it in a pretty quick time frame. I got to hire some really great people to help out, and while the mechanics are still fundamentally flawed, the rebuilt game looks much better and doesn't crash every 2 minutes. Unity has a lot to do with the last part (I think USC built the original version in Torque).

The old timers

Someone recently asked me for examples of my work. I realized I haven't actually posted much in the way of final products or screen shots of the games I work on. That changes today! This is actually one of the first (of many) math games I created with Unity.

It's a game about using machines (they represent math operations) to transmute elements (mathematical expressions) into a desired form. There wasn't a lot of research behind the mechanics here, and it mostly served as a test to evaluate Unity as an engine for iOS games. I still think this is kind of a fun little puzzle game, even if it doesn't teach much.