Course Reflection

This course (CS108) has been very informative helping students like me to learn a lot about many aspects of games such as history of games, definitions, game designs, game development process, new technologies both software and hardware based, etc. To be more specific the aspects I mentioned included a great variety of complex engines and tools available to us making it easier to create things such as art, entertainment, tools and utility programs as well as brining in some ideas and inspirations about potential future projects. Some of those projects have been developed by students to different degrees from rough pre-alpha stage prototypes to completely amazing and outstanding fully developed games and applications. Aside from acquiring and expanding a great amount of knowledge throughout this course, I have personally improved my skills in areas such as programming, writing(blogging), tools and applications usage via hands-on work. Thanks to our instructor, prof. James Morgan, this course has been very enjoyable and helpful :)

CarbonCraft

Main Menu

CarbonCraft is a collaborative educational game teaching kids about energy usage in the house. It is a game we have created on the topic of climate change and environmental sustainability.There are very few games in the climate change category of educational games. High quality climate change games are coming out but none have multiplayer elements. We understand that getting into schools is difficult, but our approach and partnership with curriculum developers will make entry easier. CarbonCraft is aimed towards middle school students. By seeing the changes that their decisions make they will be learning by doing rather than by taking tests. Based on how efficient their choices are, they will be rewarded with CarbonCoins to purchase upgrades for their home. The players will then be rated on their choices and given awards bavsed on how efficient their home is.

Kitchen and Player's UI

So far the plan is to make CarbonCraft a co-op game where players would be able to walk around the kitchen, pick up items and throw them into the baskets. Their first goal is to gather one item from each category on the checklist in order to cook breakfast with the most energy-efficient ingridinets possible. Each item has different characteristics of water consumption, waste it creates and CO2 it produces. Also, in order to keep electricity usage in check, a player has to turn off appliances which he/she doesn't use.

Minigame

 We have also added minigames, statistics and quizes to make the game more fun to play.

Statistics(beef production)

Quiz(Boss Fight)

GPS Games

PokemonGo(left: 3d virtual space; right: augmented rality)

Ingress and PokemonGo are GPS-based, augmented-reality games available on Android and iOS developed by Niantic where the latter can be considered a more advanced and more popular version of the former. The two games allow players to progress through the game via interaction between the real world and the virtual world. GPS-based games add some flavor to the process of playing because the virtual space is directly linked to real world through the locations which match in both worlds. When you move in the real world, you also move in the virtual world, though it's not possible to do that in reverse (^_^).

Ingress. In-game map.

I've played Ingress before. While there seems to be a variety of things to do like finding and hacking portals as well as spreading your faction's influence, the spectrum of actions playes can perform is very limited making the game being interesting in a short-term and boring in a long term. The only reason the game was interesting to me was because of the game's unique flavor of the two spaces, virtual and real, being related to each other.