Smogmon: The serious game about CO2
During my third year in college I created a serious game called Smogmon where children could defeat the smogmon. This was a way to teach about the CO2 pollution.
During my third year in college I created a serious game called Smogmon where children could defeat the smogmon. This was a way to teach about the CO2 pollution.
Before getting to this end-product there have been many ideas about potential solutions. However we settled on a basic game concept in order to not make it too difficult.
As the player you would become a traveler in space with the mission to destroy these "smog monsters" or in other words Smogmon.
For this interactive game I had many ideas about which technology we could use. These kids needed to "play", they needed to move! Getting them sitting behind a computer would not do the job. I came to the conclusion to use wii-remote technology. However this was not up for the task. The next in-line would be playstation move. It took some while to figure out but in the end I managed to use it with Unity.
Several things had to be done. First of all it, there had to be a system of enemies spawning on the planet, and whithin a certain range so they could be seen in the game. I had the problem that an enemy would appear beyond the screen. However that would make the game not playable at all. It worked... up till crashing. I put no limit for enemies. my laptop didn't like that as much.
Next thing was player control and gameplay. The play had to actually hit enemies within a certain time. Movement was done with the controller. Once the player hits an enemy it is "destroyed". Luckily this was easier than setting the controller up itself. The simple building blocks were set.
Adding the textures made the game seem whole and playtesting went right and wrong. Not everytime did it work as expected, but in the end it was playable. However my laptop couldn't handle the recording simultaneously while playing the game. Hence the laggy video.