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Odyssey is a unique science adventure game where you need to navigate across a group of islands in search of a 13-year old girl Kai and her family trapped and waiting to be rescued. The game has an explicit purpose of teaching astronomy and mechanics from the ancient Greeks to Galileo. It does so by taking the player through an intellectual journey as the player is physically navigating through the islands. Gaming is seamlessly integrated with a historical approach to science and storytelling, through Kai's in-game journal from which the player learns the story and the science content, which are needed to solve the puzzles. Players can expect a significant amount of reading. To leave them clues about how to solve the puzzles, Kai tears up her journal and plants fragments all over the islands, so that the fragment in each place has clues relevant to the puzzle at that place. The puzzles are arranged in a sequence that mirrors the chronological progression of ideas in astronomy and mechanics. So the player would be learning the history of astronomy and mechanics in a systematic sequence as he/she navigates through the islands. The first game which is being released in Early Access covers Chapters 1-3 of the adventure. Chapter 1 covers the origins of science, and the shift from the flat earth of the Pre-socratics to the spherical earth and physics of Aristotle. Chapter 2 covers the shift from the geocentric universe of Ptolemy to the heliocentric universe of Copernicus and Galileo. Chapter 3 covers the tussle between Galileo and the followers of Aristotle on free fall motion. The third chapter ends midway through Galileo's physics and we plan to continue the story in a sequel game, which would cover the following chapters: Chapter 4 would cover the mathematics of uniformly accelerated motion as developed by Galileo (1D kinematics). Chapter 5 would cover Galileo's ideas about inertia and the mathematics of projectile motion (2D kinematics). Chapter 6 would complete the birth of a new physics with the construction of the three Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation by Newton. Meant for ages 11+. |
