Summer Jobs, TGB, and Nuclear Fission

I've decided to get a summer job. But not bagging groceries or flipping burgers. I'm making games. Specifically, I'm working at Brandeis, and making games to teach various chemistry concepts to freshman. I decided to use TGB because I already have used with TGE and TGEA. But in ease of use, intuitiveness, and just plain awesomeness, TGB blows the other two engines out of the water. Big thanks to GG for this one.

Anyways, the first game was going to be about equilibriums. And I had thought of the most creative title ever for it:


Behold: My leet inkscape skills.

The premise of the game is very simple (if you understand chemistry). You have a reaction at equilibrium, and you have to get all the chemicals to the indicated levels. You can remove chemicals or add them, but your score is determined by how little you waste. The catch? Everything you add or remove affects the levels of the other chemicals.


If I remove some hydrogen, that unbalances the reaction, so some water will react to form H2 and O2. So H2O and H2 go down, and O2 goes up.

The reactions get progressively more complex. For example, If I add SO4 2-, do you think the amount of H2SO4 will go up or down?

So has your brain exploded yet?

As I was making this, I was wondering "What the heck am I gonna do next?" But as I was riding my bike to the train station, inspiration struck.


Asteroids. With radioactive atoms. (And yes, I will add my own graphics eventually.)

I think I can say truthfully that this game has more realistic physics than crysis.
Well, sort of.
That is to say, it uses the correct decay patterns of over 3000 isotopes, collected (with some difficulty) from Mathematica (a really hard to use program). Of course, the half-lives are shortened a bit to expedite gameplay a by a few thousand years. The goal of the game is to create stable isotopes. You shoot various sub-atomic particles at the nuclei, causing them to decay. Once an isotope is stable, it explodes (why not?) and shows up on the right. The smaller it is, the more points you get.

My favorite part is this.


You can choose what particles you want to shoot, depending on how you want to play the game. So if you want to try splitting those big atoms and getting more points (not to mention the possibility of neutrons flying everywhere in a somewhat comical fashion), you can use alpha particles. And if you want to stabilize atoms without making them any bigger, you can use electrons and positrons.

The great thing is, this is the result of only 80 hours of work. (Incidentally, it would be very nice if there were behaviors in the 3D engines... *wink wink nudge nudge*)

So, here are some more screenshots: