Games for Change

Leading a team of six, I worked together with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and 2and2 to design and build a cross-platform HTML5 point-and-click adventure game. My vision was for a game where learning outcomes were delivered through player action rather than rote learning incentivised by 'badges' and 'levels'.

I built Zoom using CreateJS, Coffeescript and RequireJS. A HTML5 canvas game of unprecedented size, Texturepacker and /packer/ were used to fit the whole narrative experience in under 10MB, playable on iPad2.

A lot of nuclear education takes a "benefits demonstration" approach, my design aimed at demonstrating the process to dispel the image of 'dangerous science'. Focusing on images of the humans on both ends of the chain, the reactor pool and the isotypes fills in critical gaps of the public's view of the reactor.

Collaboration with both the instructional designer and with ANSTO's marketing team was essential to first gain a complete understanding of science and logistics behind the isotope process, and then to design a game that was accessible and met the very specific needs of the client and their broad target audience.

Working with NDARC and 2and2, our goal was to delay first use until 18 to take advantage of a correlation of decreased problem usage later in life. With existing drug campaigns often having the opposite of their intended effects, we aimed to be honest and reserved.

We looked at current trends and decided on a learning outcome of performance inhibition. We allowed players to 'use drugs' - an unprecedented presentation in the field, but critical to dispell the anticipation around them - then disincentivised them through making them mechanically boring.

Working with ESA and 2and2, I transitioned the studio from waterfall e-learning development to agile game development processes.

I developed the CreateJS and Coffeescript workflow that would later be applied to future 2and2 projects like ABC Zoom and Halflife Hero.