Educational/Research Games
This educational game series was created for PennState University. The games are designed as a component to a new school curriculum that uses games, activities and stories to promote social skills, early-reading and math skills. I was responsible for communicating with a team of researchers and implementing their concepts into finalized games. I designed the game and illustration aspects, as well as the characters and world that would be feature that linked all the components together in the curriculum. The games were designed to progress at an adaptive pace to the player and record data around player interaction over time for analysis by researchers.
Energy Chickens is a game I designed for Penn State University in collaboration with the department of architecture. The purpose of the project was to design an interactive interface to modify behaviors in an office setting in order to decrease excessive energy consumption. I designed Energy Chickens as a kind of virtual pet game where each chicken represented a different appliance and energy consumption habits were reflected in the chicken's health and happiness. Using external plugload monitors, the game created a chicken for each appliance belonging to the player and encouraged the player to 'care for their pets' by decreasing their energy consumption relative to an established baseline. I was responsible for working with a team of researchers to design, create and implement the game in an office setting.
More detail can be found in the published paper on the project here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778814000747
More detail can be found in the published paper on the project here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778814000747