Blog Archives

Hanging in there…

I am applying for an academic grant to study Immune Defense, to figure out what it teaches and how it affects the attitude of our players towards cell biology. We’d like to optimize Immune Defense for the creation of confidence in our players. We want our players to learn how to use receptors,

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Posted in Game Design and Development


Fall

Feels like the end of the year, like “it’s all over now.” Summer is gone. I think the whole finality feeling is because I’m burnt out. Me and everyone else. Winter in central Pennsylvania is a wet, dreary, cold, long long long time.

I go to the university building almost daily now,

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Posted in Game Design and Development


NanoCrasherVR Music and Art

Protein Art  We have recruited an expert structural biologist to our project!  Martina Maritan, Ph.D. is a structural biologist, which means she studied the shape of proteins, and in particular, she used X-Rays the same way Rosalind Franklin did.  Now she is a postdoc in the Molecular Graphics Lab,

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Posted in Game Design and Development
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Iterative Game Development for Novel Science Games

This is my guide for developing novel game mechanics in collaborations with scientists, doctors, teachers, and any other kind of non-typical video game development team members. In 2010, I was the scientist learning game design and product management on the fly.  Immune Defense was the result.

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Posted in Game Design and Development


Hey! We are on Patreon! We are building NanoCrasherVR!

It is finally official.  I have a little team, we are working on the little game called NanoCrasherVR, and we are so committed that we started the Patreon page!  I will be blogging more than twice each month and about our game dev progress, and once or twice a month and about game design/proteins/science communication…

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Posted in Development Blog, Game Design and Development


The Atari Game Adventure Feels like Biochemistry to Me

I recently gave an interview where I expressed myself clearly (and the interviewer did a great job editing me to sound more clear!)   Here is the interview, by Chris Styles, for SciComm Stories.   http://scicommstories.com/020-playful-discovery-with-melanie-stegman/

So this week, in lieu of a proper blog post from me,

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Posted in Game Design and Development


Game Design Realities

I’m designing a game about digestion. I have a pad of paper with details like how much glucose is in a gummi bear, how fast the glucose gets absorbed into the blood stream, where the player can place glucose receptors and how much they should cost… But I also have a pad of paper with blogging topics,

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Posted in Development Blog, Game Design and Development
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the Future is here!

Well, the future I mentioned in my last post is here, anyway. I’ve been working on a new game, a new biochemistry game and it is a tower defense game about nutrition. This is the third biochemistry game I’ve started making in my nights and weekends, and well, I don’t want it to become just another prototype.

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Posted in Game Design and Development


The Future

Dear friends, thank you for coming on this ride with me. Since I founded MJG in 2014, a lot has happened. The state of public understanding of molecular cell biology is more important than ever. How can you trust someone if you don’t understand the words they are using? All of these last 6 years,

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Posted in Game Design and Development


Fly Eyes!

I am so excited.
I was concerned at first the Samsung might not be making any more VR Headsets… I want to buy one and they are not listed as products on the Samsung website, what is up with that? They are for sale for $500 on Amazon. The price has doubled since I bought mine…

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Posted in Game Design and Development


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