So yeah, all my research in one post, this is going to be fun…
Anyways, My game started as just real combat, but as I saw we needed a learning aspect I thought about what would be good and fun to base my game around, after going through three things, I came to the conclusion that the cell would be the best aspect. So my game focuses on telling you what the parts of the cell are and some of their functions, while it’s not completely realistic, it gets the point across.
To do this I researched what the parts of the cell do, I found some interesting stuff, i won’t go too into it since mostly it’s just their basic concepts that I added into my game, for example ribosomes make proteins in cells, and these proteins can help to make new organelles in the cell, which made me make the ribosomes the builders of the game. Your basic structures will already be made in my game as well as starting you off with 10 ATP tokens, the currency of the game which is used to make everything in the cell.
To put it shortly, I twisted the way some of the things may work in the cell to make them more simple, otherwise only an expert in biology would understand how my game worked, I want this game to be playable by almost anyone, so it would be bad to restrict the crowd since it would be too complex. I made it mostly so that it is playable by anyone, while you may have more understanding if you took a biology class to learn what the names of the cell parts are for, otherwise it’ll just be like a regular MMORPG fantasy with the weird names for places and people you need to remember to play through the game. So in short it’s playable by practically anyone with the smarts to not be stupid.
In my game, the mechanics involve controlling a mitochondria to create and improve in order to dominate the cell, with opponents who have the same start as you do. I’d say my game is primarily a strategy game. To win, you must be the last mitochondria standing (or floating, since this is in the cytoplasm) , this does not mean controlling all of the cell, but that you are the last one on the cell, when a mitochondria is destroyed, all of that players territory becomes neutral so you could end up with only five spaces controlled yet win the game.