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

Download Game

Contribution

• Game Design
  • Gameplay Design
  • Content Design
  • Educational Design
  • Level Design
• Project management

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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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

What's new at each level: