Radiation For Kids

Teaching serious subjects at a difficult time.

The Radiation for Kids game is designed to teach young children about radiation in an entertaining environment. It utilizes puzzles and matching games for the youngest children and provides an isometric hospital environment for older kids.

Players use a character to explore the different rooms of the hospital. The hospital is displayed as a 3D isometric environment filled with objects and other equipment. Animations and narrations are used to explain the purpose of the various items in the hospital.

The main menu displays how content is organized by different target age groups. The teddy bear in the bottom right-hand corner is constantly present and helps the player through the games.

As a member of the conceptual design team and as lead developer and programmer, I had a number of specific responsibilities:

• information architecture
• all programming and technical design
• sound design and implementation
  
• functional specification
• technical design document
• development of production workflow processes

We developed an isometric room editor to make the production process easier. This tool was used to add and position objects within a room as well as to define the interactive scripts for each object.

This project posed some specific challenges such as implementing a wayfinding algorithm, providing for threaded background character interactions and events and the design of a limited scripting language for developers.

The clients (Hospital for Sick Kids and Princess Margaret Hospital) were thrilled with the final project. Recently they moved forward to request an extended set of animations and games to be incorporated into the isometric environment.