Design Process
Quaternary is meant to teach high-school aged children foundational concepts relating to genetics and biology in general.
Design guidelines
- Accessible
- Educational
- Fun!
The driving principles behind the development of quaternary stem from its intended audience: high school students. This group is large and diverse. Particularly, we can not guarantee that any particular student would be familiar with video games. For this reason, we chose to make the game primarily mouse based, with little to no keyboard input. In addition, we tried to make the game as accessible as possible to those with colorblindness. To this end, all UI elements do not rely on color to impart all necessary information.
We also wanted to make the game as fun as possible while still being as educational as possible. So every idea had to not only be fun, but communicate a biology concept. This requirement made the development of Quaternary much more challenging then it would have been normally. In its current state, Quaternary is a set of prototypes that hope to achieve this aim.
Game Organization
The game is organized in two categories: main game and mini games. This echoes very commercially successful games such as Plants vs Zombies.
Main game
The main game was originally conceived as a “simulation” of natural selection where the outcome is dependent on the traits the player selects.
TODO: Video of dragndrop traits
To this end, we implemented a trait system that utilizes a custom ECS system for managing each entity.