Our goal at Molecular Jig is to create Immune Defense. This game is going to be a large, Real Time Strategy / Tower Defense / Molecular Biology mash up. This game is the game you supported in our INDIEGoGo. We’ll have more posts soon describing our designs for Immune Defense.
In order to reach our goal we need to 1) fund our business 2) refine our game mechanics, art and game presentation 3) introduce molecular cell biology game mechanics to the world and 4) build an audience. (Blog posts on each of these topics to come, too). We are focusing for the next 6 months on creating “smaller” games that each focus on different aspects of the Immune Defense universe. These smaller games will first be developed for teachers to use in their classrooms, with perhaps less polish but with detailed lesson plans attached. We will polish up the games and release them on Android and iOS. In the app store, the first 30 seconds of the game must be highly polished,and our play-testing in schools will help. We hope the two school releases will help fund us and help introduce our game mechanics to a wide audience.
One of the mechanics in Immune Defense is controlling the white blood cells’ activities by changing the receptors on their outer surface. We love this mechanic because it gives the player a wide range of options, puts the player in the driver seat and also make the mechanic exactly what we want to teach. However, most people have never heard of receptors on cell surfaces. Introducing this giant concept, this completely novel game mechanic and the rest of Immune Defense all at the same time is a lot. Our play testing results indicate this.
Our smaller games are letting us play around with smaller pieces of the mechanic. For example, one of our smaller games will be an endless runner. The name of the game is Speedy Cell. The goal of Speedy Cell is to catch as many pathogens as possible, while avoiding pitfalls like bacteria that infect and kill your cell. Unlike our other precursor game, Microbot C85, the player does not need to catch every pathogen in order to win. In Speedy Cell, the player rides along with a white blood cell as it moves along an “endless” track through the body, encountering pathogens as it goes. The more pathogens the white blood cell eats, the higher the point score.
The trick to this game will be to swap catch receptors quickly. Different pathogens will have different surface molecules and the player will need to deploy different catch receptors on the white blood cell to grab hold of these different pathogens.
The cell will also need the players’ help to move. Different move receptors will allow the white blood cell to move forward or side to side in a limited path. The player may also want to temporarily disengage the move receptors in order to coast through a space more slowly and/or to have more surface space for more pathogen-grabbing receptors.
Additionally, pathogens will have different point values, and the player will need to choose their path to maximize points and not get infected.
As a teaching tool, Speedy Cell will emphasize the fact that in real life, different receptors are used to bind with different surface molecules on pathogens. Each of our smaller games is intended to develop a piece of a bigger understanding about biochemical mechanisms. Speedy Cell players will be prepared to focus on the larger strategic aspects of Immune Defense when it’s released. We hope that Speedy cell will be a short, addicting game that draws players into our universe. We expect that our art and sound design will help to build up this fantasy universe so that along with our varied game mechanics, the Immune Defense universe becomes irresistible.
Prototype 1 of Speedy Cell will be ready for our game scientists and beta testers to preview in this fall.
