So I promised to post daily, so here it is. I am working on the storyboard for our simpler and more engaging tablet game. We think that starting the player with only 1 kind of receptor and one cell will help the player build understanding and therefore confidence with this new kind of game object. So what I am trying to do is find fun maneuvers to make with this simple set up. I am arranging three kinds of bacteria: E. coli, Staph and pneumococci to challenge the player. eating them all will be easy, eating them all with the least amount of inflammation will be tricky, but which direction to move in is your only concern…. In this intro scene, we only have Move Receptors available.
Scientists’ Corner:
I am also researching the “Purple Cytokine” and a new to us cytokine we are calling “Red” for now. Purple Cytokine is modeled on C5a and Red is modeled on N-Formyl-peptides. Both of these soluble signals will attract a cell toward an infection, but I am looking for interesting differences between the two, so we can exploit them in game play. So far I have found that C5a (Purple Cytokine) should become less effective with time, because cells have fewer copies of the Purple C receptor after they have been exposed to the Purple C signal for a few hours. (Our game levels take less than 10 minutes to play but the process in real like takes about 2 hours.) So we can possible use this in the game, so that players are encouraged to use Purple C in the beginning and leave the Red N-Formyl for later… How to make this fun, how to make all of this fun is the question.
Perhaps tomorrow (Or Saturday when I’m back from Thanksgiving) I will chat a bit about the special effects and feedback we are adding so that the game feels more fun and interactive.
