CellCraft

“Okay, time to get out in front of this LOVELY storm that arrived in my inbox this morning.

My name is Lars Doucet. I spent hundreds of hours programming CellCraft, and I’m going to set the record straight once and for all:

Despite the private beliefs of some people on our support team, CellCraft is NOT intended to be a “Creationist” game.

For the record, Anthony (lead designer) and myself are STRONG proponents of evolution. Hear that? We believe in evolution. We don’t believe in creationism. As for those who hold those views on our team, they never forced their views on us and just kept things to “what’s in a cell.”

Evolution wasn’t “removed” from the game. It was a design decision to focus on the inner workings of the cell, not the development of the cell. Anthony’s taking credit for this shift of focus, but I think he’s being noble as it was I who originally broached the subject with him.

I was concerned that if we tried to make the game about evolution, it would fail at getting the theory right and we would expose ourselves to criticism. Misrepresentation of evolution in video games is one of my big pet peeves. Pokemon “evolution” is really just metamorphosis and Spore “evolution” is nothing like the real thing. If you want to make a game about evolution, it’s really hard to give the player any agency at all – mostly you would probably just sit back and watch, if you wanted it to be ACCURATE (we are being criticized for instance, that a “unseen force” is “intelligently” directing the cell, ie, the PLAYER). I’d actually really like to make a game about evolution and emergent complexity one day, genetic algorithms are really cool and I think it’d be fun and educational.

Basically, I thought with our very limited budget we could focus on evolution, or focus on how the cell works.

Our biologists were our support staff. They did not tell us how to make the game. We just phoned them up and said, “Jed, how does a Chloroplast work?” and Jed would tell me. “David, how does a lysosome work?” and David would tell me. That’s it. I would consult with Anthony, I would code something, and I would send it to David & Jed to see if it was accurate. We would forward it on to grad students and other scientists who would check it too.

Now, as for other game design decisions. In order to make a video game, certain things have to happen:

1) You have to introduce new features one by one

2) You have to build on previous lessons and grow to stronger complexity so the player doesn’t get overwhelmed

3) You put the player through a series of sadistic tests, each harder than the next (ie, levels)

4) You have to make the player care about what’s happening in the game

Our cheesy platypus story was our attempt to hit the four points above. As for Platypi being a “secret code” for creationism, this is actually pure coincidence. The Platypus was Anthony’s idea because he thought they were cute. As for the panspermia thing, we were actually trying to make fun of panspermia. Also, we once had some contacts at Maxis who were following our game’s development, and once upon a time we were planning on pitching CellCraft to them as a “prequel” to Spore, but with more accurate biology. In the beginning of Spore, the first cell comes on a meteor, and we kind of ran with that idea. The association later dissolved, but the story was written and animated by that point.

Organelles “fall out of the sky” not because we’re trying to say that’s ANYTHING like in real life, but because “now it’s time for you to learn about the nucleus” so, POOF! Here’s a nucleus. Just like a video-game powerup. I suppose I could have made them fade in or something, and just say they were all “hidden,” but I’d heard that scientists can actually splice organelles into cells in a laboratory setting to make “franken-cells”, and so I thought this was a cool story hook. This was not meant to say that these things come out of nowhere!

Obviously, a cell can’t live without a nucleus. Obviously, you can’t just throw a centrosome in there. Obviously, we’re also omitting 99% of the rest of the things that are in a cell. This is Freshman biology, we had a narrow focus and a tiny budget, and we were just barely able to finish this game with the features it did have. On the evolution thing, we didn’t see it so much as “omitting” or “censoring” evolution so much as focusing on cellular mechanics rather than cellular origins. If this has led people to strange conclusions, that can’t be helped. The game will be open source and if any of you would like to change it to your heart’s contents, you’re more than free to do so. Thanks for coming here to let us set the record straight. If you have any more questions, please let me know.”

This was posted by Lars Doucet on our forums this morning. Please leave all comments there where we can talk with you.  Thank you

-Sam

Well, while it’s still fairly early (less than 72 hours into the release), I can say honestly that, despite being very proud of the game prior to release, it has truly exceeded my expectations.  The two biggest sites that we have uploaded the game to, Kongregate and Newgrounds, are competitive, high-level gaming sites with discerning players.  On those sites, users rate games on a scale out of 5.0, and anything over a 4.0 is considered to be a very good game, though I think Kongregate tends to have slightly lower scores on average.  On Newgrounds, the game currently has an impressive 4.40, which won us #1 Game/Movie of the Day on the release day and currently has us in tight contentions for the #1 Game/Movie of the Week. On Kongregate, we have a fantastic 4.28, putting as currently as the #2 game released so far this month.  If the score holds we would be in the top 50 games ever released on Kongregate (#44 out of over 30,000 games).

It’s possible that the scores will fluctuate a little over time, but the fact that a very educational game is not only even with, but actually kicking the butts of pure-entertainment games is incredibly exciting.  Despite a few bugs (some of which we fixed over the weekend, though it’s a sad truth that every game has bugs, no matter how much testing you do), people have been incredibly excited and enthusiastic about CellCraft.  Just this morning, jayisgames.com (http://jayisgames.com/archives/2010/07/cellcraft.php), one of the biggest Flash game review websites, featured a very positive review of CellCraft on their front page!

In these first three days, the game has been played over 200,000 times across a total of 75 different websites in over 150 countries, with an average play time of almost 44 minutes per play.  The play time especially is very cool to me – people are really getting into this and many people are getting all the way through the game.

I’ve also been collecting comments that we’ve received, and while I have many more great quotes, and I’ve included a sample of them below.  All in all, this has been a remarkable release and I’m extremely proud of the game and of the team that created it.  People are clearly excited by the idea of game developers creating quality, fun, educational games, and hopefully this is just the beginning.

Quotes from comments and messages:

“I never really liked biology – don’t ask me why – I was always a physics nerd. But THIS. THIS made biology entertaining. What you and your team have done here is genius, my friend, and I hope you continue to develop funducational games like this.”

“Hi, my wife and I both love your game. She is a science teacher and immediately wanted to use it with her class.”

“This is awesome. I never, ever thought that real quality “edutainment” was possible. But this is it, while its no 40 hour addiction, this game is genuinely fun to play, and it was a lot of fun seeing everything I remember from biology class. Thank you guys, 5/5. This is a serious accomplishment. Pat yourselves on the back. ”

“As a developer and a medical school student, I’m really impressed. Great game.”

“First FUN educational game!”

“[This game] must be ported to bigger platforms, the concept is great, the realization is even better and it really teaches a lot while not boring ANYONE.”

“I’m going to save this game on my favorites, for when i take AP bio ”

“Wonderful game [with] nearly flawless gameplay. Building a cell from a defenselessness to a biological tank is thrilling in a unique way! And learning about how every step in making your cell capable of surviving is intriguing as well.”

“Thank goodness for a game that makes some biology accessible for younger folks. Tools like this help to make science less intimidating. Nice work.”

“*Sigh* I wish I had this game to study for Biology last year…”

“This game HAS to have a sequel!”

CellCraft was released yesterday!  So far we’re pretty proud of the results.  We’ve had many positive comments so far, and the game has been played extensively.  Thanks for all of the positive comments on the last blog post, we really love hearing what everyone thinks!

You can find the game here, http://www.kongregate.com/games/CellCraft/cellcraft.  You can post comments about the game at that site, or right here if you would prefer.

Happy gaming everyone!

We’re getting close to release! Hopefully by the end of this week (no promises though). Check back soon for an official date!

Your cell has been dropped in a foreign environment! Oh no!

Your guardian with thumbs is desperately searching for you, but it’s going to take a while.  As the seconds count up, the degrees Celsius count down. It’s getting cold, and if you don’t find a way to raise your cells temperature quickly, then your friend won’t have any live cells to find at all!

Oh also, there are viruses. No squandering resources!

So what would you do?  In CellCraft, we have a catastrophic situation much like the one posed above.  We provide you with a solution to work torwards, but I want to know what YOU would do if you were the cell.

Submit your suggestion via a comment, remember to use biologically accurate processes, though our cell is a Frankenstein cell and doesn’t have to necessarily conform to “normal” conditions.  You can suggest processes found in ANY type of cell of ANY organism at ANY stage in life.  Perhaps a prize can be secured for the winner!

Looking at the photo below, you’ll notice there are several bars and icons at the top of the screen.  Those used to playing video games might be a little stunned at just how many resources there are.  However, those of you who know about cells are familiar with the macromolecules of the cellular world.  Glucose, nucleic acids, fatty acids (lipids) and amino acids are all necessary for the cell to survive, and thus are present in our game!  ATP also reserves a spot in the game, as it is necessary for everything!  Anytime you “buy” an enzyme or a protein or split an organelle or add to your membrane, varying amounts of these 5 resources are consumed.  ATP becomes extremely important, as if you run out your cell will die.  Some of these resources such as glucose, amino acids and nucleic acids can be scattered around for you to pick up.  Others can be obtained from the remains of defeated viruses.  Your cell can also produce some of these in various ways.  For instance, if your cell has chloroplasts you can generate glucose from sunlight (which varies in intensity from level to level).  Gylcolysis taking place in the cytosol can turn 1 glucose into 1 ATP.  With the addition of mitochondria your cell can, of course, up it’s ATP production.  If you have an excess of glucose, you can turn the extra into fatty acids.

Managing these resources and focusing on producing what you need can be tricky.  Sure, you may need fatty acids, but in order to get an excess of glucose you may need to momentarily disable your mitochondria which can make ATP scarce.  Or you can divide your chloroplasts, but doing that requires spending resources and increases your free radical production.  Everything has an effect on your cell, and you need to make sure you’re aware of the consequences before you act.

There are a lot of things going on in CellCraft, and lots of tasks to complete, however the one that makes everyone excited is the concept of fighting viruses.

There are 3 types of viruses featured in CellCraft Injectors, Invaders, and Infesters.  Based on the characteristics of real viruses, our viruses represent the ways that viruses manage to attack cells.   Injectors, well…inject!  They inject viral RNA into cells that try to make it to your ribosome to make new viruses.  The escaping viruses hurt your membrane.  Invaders actually penetrate your membrane before releasing their RNA, hurting your membrane twice.  They also are more dangerous as their RNA is exposed to your cell defenses for a shorter amount of time, increasing their chances of making it to the ribosome.  Finally, we have infesters, which “infest” your nucleus by injecting viral DNA which mutates your cells DNA to produce RNA to make more viruses.

So then what are your defenses?  Well you have a few options.  First, you have slicer enzymes, which will attack viral RNA.  Secondly, you have lysosomes, which can attack viruses inside your cell as they are.  You have defensins, which make your membrane tougher and can block incoming viruses.  Finally, you have a DNA repair enzyme, which will fix any mutations in your cells DNA.

Virus battles can get pretty hectic, as viruses numbers can grow quickly.  You need to maintain your various healths (nucleus, membrane, and ATP levels), manage your resources, and spend your resources on the appropriate defense.

I’ve got some screenshots for you guy

Here’s a rather chaotic picture, showing lots going on.  There are plenty of viruses, and viral RNA which is purple as opposed to the cell yellow RNA.  You can also see peroxisomes going to neutralize free radicals, portrayed by the green squares.  You can also see the white slicer enzymes and yellow lysosomes ready to attack oncoming viruses.

Here we have a shot of our main characters genius plan!  Inserting the DNA of their species into the essentially blank DNA of the amoeba they are creating to save their race!  Theres quite a humorous story behind game which adds to the great gamplay.

Finally, here’s a shot of your cell at the very begining, learning how to pseudopod.  It’s amazing to look at the picture above and see how much more complex everything gets.  Your cell keeps getting more and more advanced.

Find MORE screenshots on our facebook page, just search “CellCraft”

So lets talk gameplay

Our story is primed when we learn that a planet of platypuses is doomed! A few biologists decide that the best way to save the species is to embed their genome into a simple amoeba, and send it to a new planet. But space and new planets can be a dangerous place, and creating a cell that can thrive is a tricky task!

This is where the player comes in, taking control of the newly born cell in a petri dish. You have the ability to cast out pseudopods, and explore. Over time you gain more and more organelles. Mitochondria to boost your ATP production, ribosomes to make enzymes and proteins. Organelles decay over time, producing free radicals that must be neutralized. Eventually they stop working and must be broken down by lysosomes, and newer ones must be divided.

Viruses are often tossed into the petri dish to toughen up your cell, and it’s up to you to defeat them! Make defensins to toughen up your membrane, or slicer enzymes to attack viruses head on! Several virus types exist and each have different properties

Here’s a trailer of cell craft

Trailer

there are more videos on our facebook, just search “CellCraft”