Adventures in Aquaculture

Adventures in Aquaculture is a three-player arcade game commissioned by the North Carolina Aquarium Society for an exhibit at the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores. I earned the contract after developing and presenting a pitch and functional prototype for the exhibit, and am now responsible for bringing the project through full production. Built in Unity, the game lets visitors hatch and raise one of four fish species bred in the aquarium's real aquaculture lab, learning about the rearing process through a simple arcade-style gameplay loop. 

One of the most important parts of designing the game was working with the aquarium's education curator to decide where we needed to prioritize scientific accuracy, and where we could "handwave" details for the sake of making a fun game. We eventually settled on a simple rule: the actual aquaculture rearing process needed to be accurate, while details that weren't important to teaching that process could be simplified. For example, we cut species like seahorses because their development doesn't fit the game's egg-to-adult progression, but simplified differences between how the remaining species' eggs behave because those differences aren't important to what we're trying to teach. In other cases, real aquaculture practices and fish behaviors actually gave us ideas for better mechanics and visual feedback. This process let us keep the game simple and approachable without sacrificing the science that the exhibit is actually there to teach.