Although we don’t have them up on the site yet, there are a few games that our team members have developed and will eventually be shared with you via Axon. Among them is a game I created as part of my Masters degree in Biomedical Communications.
That game is The Danger Zone.
I created The Danger Zone to be a conversation-based mystery-solving game in the tradition of Carmen Sandiego and Clue. Created to teach teens food safety, players assume the role of a rookie epidemiologist tasked with solving an outbreak among a group of well-meaning but ill-fated teens (no pun intended). By interviewing experts including a physician, librarian, epidemiologist and one of the above-mentioned teenagers, players progress through the story, slowly unlocking the cause of the outbreak so they can report it back to headquarters.
You can speak to the doctor in the hospital. She runs tests on the patients among other things.
A series of comic panels describe the events leading up to the case.
This is one of the books you can read in the library, with handy colour-coded graphs showing incubation and infection periods
You can choose from a bank of avatars that are mostly based off my classmates.
So, I’ll admit that this game is not the pinnacle of gameplay or education; not yet at least. It was my first-ever video game, first game interface, first major coding project and I only had 8 months to go from rationale to wireframe to finished product (with a full course load of other projects to do). What you can play so far is essentially the tutorial level – the game in easy mode.
In the coming months we will be restructuring the code to be more modular, as well as cleaning up the interface, adding usability features and adding more sounds and voice acting. We’ll also be adding two more levels which will round out the story and allow for more challenging cases. We’ll post in here as we change things, so you can see how it’s going.
In the meantime, give the game a try (you have to create a login unfortunately…but don’t worry, we’re scrapping that too). Send us your feedback, if you’re feeling charitable. Help us polish this gem til it shines.
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