Eat-o-pia - a multiplayer phy-gital game

Eat-o-pia - a multiplayer game was an exploratory project designed to introduce and explain the concepts of Food chain in our animal kingdom. This was an academic project done as a part of Game Design module at IDC School of Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay under the guidance of Prof. Uday Athavankar.

Link to downloads

INTRODUCTION

During our Game Design module at IDC School of Design, we – a group of four participants – wanted to explore the the usage of Games in sharing knowledge of Food chain through hybrid or phy-gital games. To complete our exploratory project were allotted a time period of 1 week.

DATA COLLECTION

For this project we decided to take the help of NCERT books (National Council of Educational Research and Training) designed for students of Central board of Secondary Education India, as our primary resource.

DESIGN PROCESS

During our design iterations, we tried to achieve these objectives through this project:

Objectives

Nudge players to become aware of the energy flow within the within our environment.
To help players to understand the interdependency of living organisms in an ecosystem.
Foster an interactive environment among the players

Strategies adopted to achieve our objectives

Before starting the game, players we given a poster containing comic strips of animals. The animals on the poster talks about what they like to eat and are eaten by.
Once the game starts, players would attack – eat, the animals below their food chain hierarchy, and should skip/leave those above them.
An option to see if animals in the same level of hierarchy could attack or eat their counterparts. This would be settled by a challenge in the physical words, such as Rock-paper-scissors.

Early concepts consisted of paper prototypes of multiple ideations and test.. //make paper prototypes? add collages to conclude on the final product…

FINAL DEMO and TESTING

Eat-o-pia is a multiplayer phy-gital game that combines online play with real-world interactions. Players compete in the game, using strategy and the laws of the food chain to survive as long as possible on the game globe. The final demo was developed for android and is available here for download .

We conducted a series of play tests with school children, of age group 8-14 years.