Davi Figueiredo
Game Designer
Chemical Merge
Chemical Merge is an educational game made on GameJamPlus Rio Grande do Sul 23/24 where the player combines chemical elements to pass levels and learn about chemical bonds.
Awards
3rd place at GameJamPlus RS 23/24
Contribution
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Game Design
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Gameplay Design
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Content Design
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Educational Design
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Level Design
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Project management
Details
Planning
After the research I created a simplified version of the representations of the elements and connections, with the objective of visualizing how the connections would be arranged and how their format and complexity would affect gameplay.
Hydrogen
H
Hydroxyl
OH
Water
H2O
Oxygen
O
Oxygen Gas
O2
Tetraxygen
O4
Molecular Hydrogen
H2
Ozone Gas
O3
Hydrogen Peroxide
H2O2
Gameplay Design
The complexity of the bonds and the number of atoms per bond increases to make the game harder. This also makes it more difficult to avoid unwanted atoms or skulls that lead to the loss of the bond, since the greater the number of atoms in the bond being handled, the larger the hitbox is, the easier it is to get hit.
Bonds and atom
with Hitbox:
Educational Design
One of the great challenges of the project was to make the game fun and maintain it's educational value. I made sure to use chemical bonds that actually exist in chemistry to ensure that visual representation of each element and bond were faithful to the scientific representations.
Example: Water
H O
2
Chemical formula
O
H
H
Molecular model
In-game representation
Another example of fidelity with scientific representations is the number of bonds that each element can form, these bonds are represented by the lines between two atoms, in this case hydrogen (H) can form one bond, while oxygen (O) can form two bonds.
Oxygens form a double bond
Each hydrogen forms one bond while each oxygen forms two bonds
Even though they do not form all the possible bonds, the number of possible bonds is still represented
Level Design
In the design of each level I was concerned with always introducing something new, both to maintain players engagement and to divide all the content properly and not overload them with information.
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What's new at each level:
level 1: Bonds
level 2: Bonds with moving atoms
level 3: Dodge other atoms
level 4: Bonds with another element (oxygen)
level 5: Multiple bonds and new bonds
level 6: Dodge atoms with skull
level 7: New bond and 3 atoms bond
level 8: New bond
level 9: New bond and 4 atoms bond
level 10: New bond