In 2024, Formula Infinity Game Awards arranged its second Game Jam. The theme was Educational by Accident where participants were asked to create engineering-relevant games in which players, by playing the game, would accidentally learn engineering concepts. Nine games where produced, all with a hint of educationalism hidden inside!
Click the screenshots below for gameplay videos.
Winner of popular vote! With an impressive margin in the popular vote this game won the second Formula Infinity Game Awards! Gorgeous graphics and fantastic music adjusting to player actions. Save that egg! And learn something in the process.
Game synopsis: The egg has been displaced from its nest; it is your job to get it back with the power of frequencies. But be careful, the egg might crack!
Theme implementation: The game aims to challenge the player while accidentally teaching them about the way sine waves interact and how they can add to each other using the Fourier series.
Game synopsis: Darian Cycle is a game about creating a sustainable colony on Mars. Its goal is to show players the harshness of establishing settlements on another planet, and simulates this by forcing the player to manage resources effectively to ensure the colony’s survival. In addition, since the way of life is expected to be very different on Mars, the player is given very little information to begin with, and has to figure out how to prioritise colonist requirements to survive, while expanding the colony to allow new colonists to arrive. The game is built in Godot, and is a 2D turn-based strategy game, with each turn called a cycle. Every turn, the player can build structures to support the colony, provided enough resources are available, while also harvesting resources to allow current colonists to survive the cycle. The harvesting of some vital resources will prevent the production of other life-supporting resources. In order to win the game, the colony has to reach a threshold population and sustain it for 3 cycles. If too many colonists die or the population reaches 0, then the game is over. This encourages the player to make long term decisions for sustainability. The name ‘Darian Cycle’ is derived from the “Darian calendar” proposed during the 1980s for a potential civilization established on planet Mars.
Theme implementation: The game has been designed around the theme “Educational By Accident” where the intention is to force the player to learn while playing, gradually finding an optimal way of building and sustaining a society on Mars. Learning from your mistakes is the proverb behind game design and game philosophy. The player must acquire an understanding of the survival systems through playing and losing many rounds, managing scarce resources to survive in a foreign environment until the winning conditions are met.
Game synopsis: A first-person dialogue-driven adventure game, with minimal platforming and puzzle elements.
Theme implementation: The game aims to educate around perspective, semantics, and identifying a problem. The forest was chosen as a metaphor for being lost. The creatures and the player all suffer from applying wrong solutions or not seeing the problem. The meta-narrative of changing the game's title is meant to reflect the player's reaction to events - without actually changing anything. They are essentially educated on their very own perspective, when things seem confusing.
Game synopsis: Curve Craze is a puzzle game where you use equations to avoid obstacles and move a ball to the goal. There are 7 levels of increasing difficulty, starting with only being able to manipulate variables, then ending with being able to define functions which depend on the balls position, time, the goal position, etc. You can define any function on the form f(x)=..., and control where along the X axis that function is plotted. The ball then rolls along the graph produced by your function, hopefully ending up at the goal.
Theme implementation: Curve Craze gives the player an intuition for the shape of functions. It also presents the problem of "How do I define a function that looks and behaves in a particular way", Which is a useful skill in much of engineering. The main part of the game is problem solving, but by solving the problems that the game presents, the player accidentally learns about constructing functions, and the shape and time-dependence of certain equations.Therefore, we think that the game fits well into the theme of "Learning by Accident".
Game synopsis: A game built on python using equations of motion to toss a ball across different levels and reach the basket. The game allows the player to edit the different physics constants (mass, area, density, etc) to experience the difference in physics and also to make it easier to complete the levels. (Cheat codes, but provided by the game).
Theme implementation: Accidental education happens by letting the player change the physics of the game and see how that affects the gameplay, thus understanding how different constants affect the motion of the ball.
Game synopsis: Center Stage is a game where you, an audiophile, are tasked with making the band sound as good as possible. As you mix the band, the sweet harmonious sound of perfection draws in people from far away to applaud and cheer. Add effects, volume balance, and add to the musicality of the performance as the hidden (but oh so important) talent behind the scenes. Be wary though, if you do poorly you will cause people to leave. The show depends on you!
Theme implementation: The purpose of the game is to make a song that is initially mixed poorly sound good again. By adjusting volume faders, panning knobs, and effects such as reverb and saturation, your hands on experience will teach you the basics of audio mixing by simulating a real-world analog or digital mixer. It will also teach about the subtleties of audio mixing, since many of the most important changes to a sound are those that are barely perceptible. You are guided to the best sounding mix by rely on audience engagement through a cheer meter. As this meter goes up you know that you are doing better, and you are refining your ears talents at the same time!
Game synopsis: Perched between repleteness and affection; that's the hell our doubly starved old protagonist finds himself in. Every day, he is forced to decide how to divide up the meager amount of fish he catches. It's either him, or one of the three cute and cuddly cats outside his home.
Theme implementation: The plan was to steadily introduce the aquatic life local to the western coast of Sweden by having certain fish ordered and referred to only by name forcing you to use the fish log book to remember how certain fish look and what part of the sea they inhabit. As the game synopsis hints at by not referring to any such mechanics it wasn't a mechanic we were able to finish in the alloted time. The only accidentally educational experience you'll have when playing the game in its current state is not knowing you'd find reading the log book with the (admittedly yet) small amount of fish and facts about them engaging resulting in you learning something. While we might not have achieved everything we set out to do it was a wonderful learning experience.
Game synopsis: Grow Your Liver is inspired by the article "Scientists Grow Human Livers in Mice"by Dennis Normile. We merged insights from the article with a rogue-like maze-themed game. The game features pixel art, with everything hand-drawn and inspired by human blood vessels. Additionally, each scene includes unique audio. At the beginning and end of the game, we used manga to provide context, helping players understand the background story and their objectives. In each level, players must survive T cell attacks, collect growth factors to duplicate, and find the maze exit to advance. If a player dies, they respawn at the first level. The number of growth factors needed for duplication equals the number of stem cells the player currently has (e.g., 1 growth factor in level 1, 2 in level 2, 4 in level 3, and so on). Guides are available in the first level to help players understand T cells and growth factors, with additional tips throughout the game. As players progress, the maze becomes larger and more complex, with more enemies and growth factors to collect. For the recording, we made the game easier to facilitate a walkthrough and recorded it, including level skipping for brevity. For future development, this game will include more levels and the possibility of stem cell mutations. Although time constraints limited the inclusion of these ideas in this game jam, we think they represent exciting future directions for the game.
Theme implementation: While Grow Your Liver may initially appear as a simple roguelike maze, it accidentally educates players on key biology concepts related to the mammalian immune system and stem cell development. Players learn how induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), when exposed to specific growth factors, can divide and differentiate into hepatocytes by mimicking liver development pathways, ultimately forming functional liver tissue. The game's mechanics also illustrate how T cells in mice recognize and destroy foreign cells. Through gameplay, players gain insights into the immune system, cellular duplication, and the role of growth factors. However, the primary focus remains on survival and guiding players through the maze to grow a liver. The educational elements serve to enrich the background story, providing context and purpose without making the experience feel didactic. In general, the game balances the survival gameplay with an underlying layer of biological education, enhancing the player's experience and understanding.
Game synopsis: Botánico is a game where you, the main character, make poisons. Guided by your informational booklet you navigate a greenhouse and choose between a small variety of plants. When you have selected your ingredient you go to the big cauldron on the left side of the room and make a potion. You then go through the dark doorway and give the potion to your professor who either gives you a passing or failing grade.
Theme implementation: Botánico is teaching players to identify poisonous plants. Though the goal is to make poisons with these plants the player now knows how to identify them and can learn to avoid them in real life.
In 2023, Formula Infinity Game Awards arranged its first Game Jam. The theme was Made by AI where participants were asked to create engineering-relevant games using as much AI-aided development as possible. The result was an impressive mix of vastly different games, all with that distinctive touch of AI silliness.
There were in total eight games made during the event, and seven of these are presented below.
Winner of popular vote! With an impressive margin in the popular vote this game won the first Formula Infinity Game Awards! The game features a well-developed and advanced game loop, and gorgeous assets! A very well deserved winner indeed.
Game synopsis: Stranded on an alien world, harness unique resources to survive, craft, and thrive. Unleash your engineering genius for base-building and unravel extinct alien secrets. Your cosmic adventure awaits!
Use of AI: We started by using GPT-4 as a consultant to help us come up with a game concept during the AI Game Jam. After some back and forth with the AI, we settled on an idea and asked GPT-4 to act as an experienced game designer. It helped us create a simple game loop that suited our game and was feasible enough during a game jam. In addition, GPT-4 generated name suggestions and descriptions for the game objects. We also used Midjourney to generate concept art, which we then further developed ourselves. During programming, we used GitHub Copilot and GPT-4 to generate large parts of the code. We entered a comment describing what the code was supposed to do and the AI then generated code that worked about 80% of the time. We could then change the code ourselves a bit to match the code that already exists.
Runner-up! From an outstanding use of AI, where not a single manual intervention was made, this game was the organizers' pick for the runner-up.
Game synopsis: The game takes players on an epic interstellar journey as the revered Commander of an extraordinary starship crew. Traverse uncharted galaxies, encounter cosmic challenges, and manage resources wisely to keep the ship running. Monitor crew emotions, foster unity, and make critical decisions to ensure survival. Experience breathtaking discoveries, forge strong bonds, and leave a cosmic legacy as you lead the Stellar Crew on this unforgettable space odyssey. The universe awaits your command!
Use of AI: Absolutely everything, with no manual input to any of the code or other resources.
Game synopsis: A space optimization and time management game where you have to manage a warehouse and deliver blocks as requested. Correct deliveries give a time bonus depending on the size of the delivered box, and you lose when you either run out of time or when you don't move your boxes out of the spawn location.
Use of AI: We used arcade library on Python to create the game. We used ChatGPT to generate the code for the various elements of the game such as the blocks, collision mechanics, window design, and game mechanics. We found that while ChatGPT was extremely useful in generating 90% of the code, the remaining 10% required some tweaking and correction to get the behavior we wanted.
Game synopsis: A logistics game where you route your vehicles from a supplier to a customer.
Game synopsis: In Colorination you control a white circle collecting color coins to transform into a vibrant spectrum. The goal is to gather as many coins as possible before the time runs out. Match coin colors to the time bar's hue for extra time. Strategize, dash through the colorful and unexplored world, and paint your survival against the time!
Use of AI: ChatGPT for the program code, and Soundful for the sound effects.
Game synopsis: A strategy game where you connect power-generating windmills to castles.
Use of AI: Backgrounds were done with Stable Diffusion, music with AIVA, code with GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Labs, and general ideas generated with ChatGPT.
Game code: GitHub
Game synopsis: Stack waves to achieve a super-wave.
