The Quest to Lava Mountain

I lead the design and development of QTLM, a Zelda-like adventure game featuring food and recipe crafting.

QTLM was designed in coordination with the Cooper Institute and the Texas Department of Education, to bring a fun new way to learn about nutrition into the classrooms of elementary kids state-wide.

Project Parameters:

• Goal: Create an educational game using "Stealth Learning" to let kids play and have fun while learning deeply about nutrition and the benefits eating well has on the body.
• 3 month development time.
• Team of 2 designers, 3 artists, and 2 programmers
• Platform: Unity Web Player

My Role:

Controlled Chaos with the Cooper Insitute and the State of Texas. The requirement was to create a casual educational game about nutrition. I was hesitant to attempt to deliver a dry and boring food related matching game, so we pitched a sprawling adventure game with abilities like in Zelda, and a crafting system that would allow kids to learn the value of a nutritious meal.

My goal was to specifially recreate the feeling I had as a kid playing Oregon Trail on the Apple 2e. Oregon Trail is widley beloved because it taught history in a way that players actually felt like they had lived through it, not just read about the experience. The game we designed fit perfectly, based on 3 tightly related pillars.

1. In Quest to Lava Mountain, the player can experience a lot of fun and rigorous physical activities, outdoors, indoors, in many environments. Players learn and earn new types of actions and abilities the farther they play in the game.
2. Players need energy and health to complete these phyiscal activies. 
3. Food can give players health and energy, but the types of food can also lower or raise the player's Maximum health or energy.

QTLM uses a simple red-yellow-green encoding system to hint to players what quality the food they find or craft has. Educators we worked with loved the concept of using a color coded system since many teachers use this in schools, and kids are used to it. 

Food, Receipes, and Stats

In QTLM, players can find and craft food using recipes. Working with our lead programmer, and a nutrition education expert, we designed a system that would reward players for choosing healthy foods by granting them extra health and energy.

Key to the success of the system was acknowledging and embracing kids' desire to try out different things, and their inate curiousities.

• Food items cooked into recipes always granted more health and energy than the sum of their base elements. We wanted to encourage cooking and experiementation with food.
• Sugary items like candy bars did give the player massive energy spikes! But at a cost to their health, max health, or max energy.
• The red-yellow-green system helped kids determine which foods were going to be good for them overall, even if consuming some poor foods is OK from time to time.

Conclusion

Quest to Lava Mountain was an extremely fun project to work on, but also had to be executed on a very quick timeline. Within only a few short months our team created a wonderful, sprawling game with massive replayabilty and tons of features that dovetailed with each other and supported the overall goals of stealthily teaching kids about healthy eating.

• 10+ overall worlds, connected by trails, paths, tunnels, rivers, slides, ladders, and whirlpools.
• Dozens of food types and recipes- both healthy and unhealthy
• Dynamic Health and Energy sytem effected by food stats, player abliites and states cascading from these core traits.
• Dozens of player hats, many with important abilities such as breaking rocks, fishing, or swimming
• 3 large scale repeatable "maze" activity areas with stat tracking to encourage replay and improvement
• Multiple enemy types including several bosses
• Quirky narrative, interwoven into the quest itself with npc dialog and several quest types
• Character creator with facial, body, clothing, and other parameters.
• User profile, stats, and saves integrated with school/student platforms