Hey guys,
It's been a while, and this post is to explain where I've been this whole time. Last anyone was listening, I was hard at work on Super Energy Metropolis, the sequel to Super Energy Apocalypse, and doing some prototypes of that game. Well, life threw me a few monkey wrenches between then and now and I'm here to explain where I've been.
First, I got married, then I got a job, and then I decided I really ought to finish my Master's thesis.
So, I got married last May and took some time off. Then I was hired by Anthony Pecorella, an employee of Kongregate.com, to work on a side project of his called CellCraft.
Anthony got a grant from the McArthur foundation to do an educational game, and contacted me after playing Energy Apocalypse. Some press releases about the project: here's one from Wake Forest and here's one from Gamasutra.
Basically, the idea is - a real time strategy game about cellular biology, where the player is the cell. I've been working part-time on this since May 2009 and we're almost finished. We're due for release in early March. I'm really excited about this one. Here's a teaser graphic:
Now, the other half of my work day has been spent finishing my Master's thesis. HARC, being amazing as usual, decided to fund the thesis, which is largely why I got the paper done in less than a year. This is also why Super Energy Metropolis has yet to materialize. I'll probably do SEM some day, but for now it's tabled indefinitely. I've just got too many irons in the fire and HARC is interested in other things right now.
For the thesis, I decided to take Super Energy Apocalypse and evaluate whether it increases player's knowledge of energy economy, and if so, by how much. We did a whole research project on it, collected all kinds of data, crunched it, collated, and stapled it, and now the paper's finally done. I'd post it here, but my professor wants to shop it around to journals first, so we've got a one-year journal hold on its online publication. Check back in January 2011, hopefully we'll have it published by then :)
So, sad as it is to say, Super Energy Metropolis will have to wait for a while before it sees the light of day. But rest assured, dear gamers, that we've got tons of other cool stuff coming out the gate here at Brain Juice Games!
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.fortressofdoors.com/update/