Becoming a leader and level design

I have lured yet another good soul to my project! I thought that I needed a good story and I came to think about my good friend Hjalmar. I asked to meet him and tell him about my project and he wanted to write the story! It's great! He has a passion for writing and I feel like I'm giving him a fun area to develop his skills and acomplish something nice.

I feel like I am becoming more of a leader and my role has shifted a bit from doing everything myself to instead motivate others to share my quest. It feels nice that people want to join me. Since I am not writing the story or making the music anymore thanks to my great friends, I have to articulate, be transparent and see to it that they have what they need in order to produce great stuff. One thing I thought of was the superb teachers I have had in school. The greatest teachers who made school fun and made me understand and seek knowledge had at least one thing in common: They gave me good instructions. Good instructions that motivated me was very clear, superclear about rules and freedom. Tasks where I often failed is when I felt I didn't understand the assignment fully. The better I understood what I was suppose to be doing the more creative, relaxed and productive I could be. So I have spent some time exploring my memories to develop a leader role for myself, and I like it. I hope I manage to keep the motivation up in my team so that we can share a success. So far it feels like it's going well!

I will still make the "programming" and incorporate the information about neuroscience into a nice game though, and I like that as well.

I have set a meeting with a great proffessor at Umeå University where I study. I will present my idea to him and see what he thinks about the facts that I try to bake into this game. If the facts are outdated or just plain wrong I will toggle some switches and make the game present the ideas better and more correctly. I want to give as proper facts as possible to every player.

In order to make the most out of the meeting I have noted down specific questions about thing like:
"How can you keep a neuron alive in a petri dish"
"What makes a specific neuron to the neuron it is"
etc.
To extract good questions I realized I had to make a more precise description about the actual levels and what the player will be doing on level 1, 2 etc.. Designing the levels will also help my story writer to know what exactly needs to come out of his story.

Sketches on the game and the first level

The first level is about learning to make a neuron and the controls in the game. I want to suck the player in directly to something fascinating. So far the first level will be about making a neuron out of a stem cell and connecting it to a laser, with the experience that one is making an experiment about connecting humans to machines (transhumanism on a neural level). After that some bacteria will emerge and the player will be prompted with a message from someone saying that the bacteria will kill his inventions. I hope the player will realize that he needs to protect his neuron with the laser.

I have chosen to make a template about what a level will contain. So that it will be easy to make new levels and let my and others ideas be transparent, making the information flow through anyone who wants it.

I have so far decided to develop in gamesalad, it's the easiest program to use and seems like I will save allot of time even though I may lose in freedom. I think that it is most important to get a product to be proud of. I want to present the idea that learning can be extremely fun if you know how to teach.


I hope that my doings will influence others to be creative and make games and other things that makes information flow better.

Till next time I will have had a meeting with the proffessor and hopefully gotten some great ideas and made some great level design.

Neurons