Hello, fans of science games!
Immune Defense is being re-coded to work on the latest Apple and PC operating systems! We will have a level editor that lets us create more than 6 levels!!! I am very excited. Carl Rauscher is our developer and he’s focusing his patient analytical mind on Immune Defense’s complicated code base. I have been so impressed and so encouraged by how much headway he has made in the two months.
An old friend of mine, Chris HusVar, has been volunteering as a project manager. Together we’ve decided to use Click Up to organize all of Molecular Jig Games projects. I find it a great comfort to be able to add a task to Click Up whenever something occurs to me. Since we now have three game projects moving forward, we need to have three task lists… Click Up lets us have three lists, and then also lets us see all tasks that are due today, or this week. Chris has been a big help and the mental clarity happening in my brain as a result is making me enjoy game development again!!
We won a microgrant from the Global Game Jam, to finish a GGJ project called Strategic Repair Protocol. I’ve worked long hours trying to create some game mechanics around enzyme kinetics. My partner in this odd endeavor is Billy Grim. I say odd because I talk about things and I have no idea whether I make any sense. Billy listens and then after two hours we are both exhausted. Then, the next day, Billy has sketched up some level designs using the enzyme kinetics principles I had been struggling to explain. We have been through 4 iterations of the game mechanic now, and it is becoming possible to see how the puzzles could be enjoyable. Billy is really patient and good natured: his willingness to wade around in a sea of unknowns and oddities, to build structure out of chaos, and then to let me iterate on his ideas is the reason why Strategic Repair Protocol will be fun.
Michael Butler, who runs Atelier Monarch Studios, is our developer for Strategic Repair Protocol (SRP) He’s creating macro amount of Unity3d C# development for microgrant money! 😉 All of the action of SRP will take place on a microscope slide. Players will manage the relative concentration of 2-10 different molecules.
We plan to use SRP to teach these concepts: random movement and diffusion, enzyme rates and their dependency on local concentrations and finally, feedback mechanisms. These concepts are basic ideas required to understand important things like drug dosage, blood sugar levels, and antibody titers.
Big news: we are having a Science Game Jam! Scientists, we need you!
Read all about the Science Game Jam at ScienceGameCenter.org/jam
Congratulations, Commander! ? ETA requested.
🙂 ok, well, officially we have no ETA. But for you, I’ll tell you a bit of our plan. We are working as a volunteer team now, so we only get about 10 hours of dev time a week. We hope for a recreation of levels 1-5 in a few months, and a level editor by January. We are also applying for grants to enable us to work more hours per week, but the grants wouldn’t start till next year…. I’m excited about my volunteer dev team. And I’m really looking forward to making more levels!!!