An educational project
The website that accompanied the game taught players about collective intelligence, inspired by social insect behaviour.The game was first introduced to the public during the University of Southampton Science and Engineering Day in 2015, where it received a lot of attention. It also competed at the 9th European Conference on Games Based Learning in Norway, where it was a runner-up in the web-based games category.
The game
In the game, the player took on the role of an Overseer who was sent to an alien planet and designs simple rules that robots used to create structures brick by brick. The rule editor allowed the Overseer to specify where new bricks should be placed, depending on what a robot currently saw. The main challenge of the game was to create building rules that fitted together and resulted in a meaningful structure, despite of being executed by the robots at random and in parallel to each other.
There were three games modes available: Tutorial, Challenges and Sandbox. The Tutorial taught the player about various aspects of the game and gave them medals for completing various learning missions. In the Challenge mode, the player had to build specific structures according to the given blueprints, using as little bricks as possible. The player gained experience for completing the challenges and unlocked new challenges as a reward. Finally, the Sandbox mode let the player explore and build their own structures without any restrictions.
