Eco Park is an isometric, educational game made for Legends of Learning on the subject of food webs in ecosystems. The game is a short 10-15 minute adventure that teachers can use as a supplementary teaching tool to enrich their students’ knowledge on the topic. Students start the game playing as an animal near the top of the food web and work their way down to the source of all food and energy—the sun.
This project taught me how to design a game with some pretty severe limitations. As the game was made for 4th through 6th graders, we needed to make sure the game had proper “teaching moments” not just for the tutorialization of the game but also for the concepts about food webs. Our plethora of technical limitations also challenges our ability to design a WebGL game that has a file uncompressed file size of under 30mb and can run at 30fps on school-issued Chromebooks. This challenge helped me develop new skills in optimization and design scope.
Despite the limitations, we designed a game that is fun for children and can teach them a few new science facts along the way. In Eco Park, players must use their observational skills to watch the animals and learn their place on the food web. We then reinforce those observations through our guidebook that the player will partially fill out on their own while unlocking new animal facts based on the interactions they have observed in the game. This gives players a chance to make their own conclusions but we give them more information or hints as they continue to play.