This was a 4-week project that tied 3 minigames together to express mathematical concepts to highschool students. Essentially a teaching tool for maths teachers in the classroom.

I was able to recycle the events system from D2D/D3D which makes my earlier tool development NOT a complete waste of time. This was different from our usual game projects in that gameplay wasn't the focus. It was about showing maths in action. of the 3 game modes, all of them had a graph like this to display, the only difference would be the growth rate of data on that graph.

Each of the 3 games were named after their module within NCEA's maths class.

This was essentially a platformer where you observe zombie population in a linear graph. Zombies spawn at a constant rate, and you see the population decline in a linear fashion as you beat them on your way to the level's end.

This game ran on mobile and web with a mouse so I had to discern the platform within the game-code itself. On Mobile, these controls would appear on-screen without being too "in the way".

Our client took care of game-design and level-design for the most part with input from us, but we were mostly on as developers and artists. We drafted the following for approval before carrying on.

For exponential growth, our client wanted a maze where zombies spawned at an exponential rate visible in the graph. You would navigate the maze to find vials, which you would take to the boiler room to spread a vaccine through the chimney. I was able to use an old music track I wrote for this game, it fit well enough!

The level itself was originally meant to be 2D but after a quick test with 3D parallax we decided 3D would be quite cool.

Originally I aimed for performant art. I knew specifically what I was after regarding the level-art, and I needed to maintain it technically as well as aesthetically because I also knew from the beginning that my layout was probably wrong, and I wasn't about to waste any time creating a procedural maze builder. It needed to be built with as few iterations as possible so we could carry on under the deadline. I basically built something large and trapping, the feedback was that it was too trapping. It was easy to get cornered by more zombies than you could deal with.

Our client said the layout caused them to get trapped too often in dead ends, or swarmed by zombies in hallways. We made the maze less like a series of narrow corridors, and more like a series of large open rooms. This meant even if you got swarmed, there was plenty of room to move.

We simplified the UI, rather than showing an icon for each of the 5 vials, we just showed 1 icon with a counter next to it.

I passed a rough concept off to Lena, who worked on it and gave me back a developed piece.

The design was drawn for tile-based top-down but could not be achieved with this 3D perspective. Wall-art was basically lost, which is unfortunate

Maxc worked out projectile arc prediction with quadratic equations which fitted our brief, I handled all the level events from there.

The brief for this part was basically "angry birds but with quadratic maths expressed".

Not much to say really, aside from the quadratic paths, everything else was sortof able to be recycled from one of the earlier levels.

It honestly felt like a major feat to get through all 3 games in the time we had (a little over 4 weeks). Just take a peek at our trello schedule that was set. That's a lot of work to manage during not-day-job hours. Especially because I set tasks as "essentially done". It's sortof my own fault that I can't help myself when I want to add a little extra nice-ness to a feature that wasn't scheduled.