Game Mechanics

Right down to business. 

Every game needs a catchy name. As part of the course concerns the study of Human evolution. I've called my game (at the moment) A Game of Humans.

I've decided to go for a levelling game, where students start at level 1 and move through to level 11. They move up levels by completing tasks or objectives. I decided to have two parallel streams of objectives, the first being academic objectives such as completing the tasks for a particular topic (There are 20 of these in the year) or achieving their target grade in progress tests throughtout the year. There are quite a lot of these and I'm sure more of them will be explained in the due course of time.
 
There are also a list of Pastoral objectives, such as complete SMART targets with their Personal Tutor or have a one to one meeting with their Personal Tutor. Again there are a number of these, and I'm sure I'll explore more of these in the fullness of time.

Each completed objective gains the student 10 experience points (XP). I've decided to make it fairly easy to move from level 1 to level 2 in order to give students a sense of achievement and keep them wanting to play. Only 40 XP are needed to move from level 1 to 2. This idea came from Skyrim, in which levelling is relatively easy at low level, but get progressively more difficult.

As already mentioned the game is about Human evolution, so the students start at level 1, and each level is named after a different species eventually ending with Homo sapiens. The names of the levels are as follows.

Level 1 Smilodectes gracilis (very early prosimian)
Level 2 Aegyptopithecus zeuxis (early monkey species)
Level 3 Proconsul africanus (very early ape species)
Level 4 Sahelanthropus tchadensis (one of the last known common ancestors of humans and Chimpanzees)
Level 5 Australopithecus afarensis (studied in the course)
Level 6 Homo habilis (studied on course, tool user)
Level 7 Homo erectus (studied on course, fire user)
Level 8 Homo heidelbergensis (ancestor species of modern humans)
Level 9 Homo neanderthalensis (Studied on course)
Level 10 Homo floresiensis (may only have died out about 12000 years ago)
Level 11 Homo sapiens (Us)

So that's the basic game mechanics. I've decided to use Moodle to organise the game so in the next blog I'll start describing how that process is going. Currently everything is in the development stage so if you have any comments or advice, please feel free to let me know.