comaDosis

• Illustration & animation (Flash)
• Game Engine (ActionScript 2)
• Behavior AI (ActionScript2)

Faced with the problem of wanting to make drug-education attractive to young kids and teen-agers, I developed comaDosis as a non-condescending non-linear non-black&white computer-game to teach kids the downs of drug-use by doing.

comaDosis puts you in a strange world, a mixture of dream and your own past. Your aim is to snap out of it, correct your past mistakes, not use drugs this time, and wake up in the real world.

The concept

The assignement

To create an interactive project with educational value on the theme of drugs.

My first reaction: drugs?… not AGAIN! My second reaction: hmm, many kids must think the same… My conclusion: how can we make anti-drug campaigns attractive again?

The idea

Being the nerd I am, I naturally came upon the idea of a computer game. The most successful game themed on drugs being DrugWars (which involved dealing as much as you can & avoiding trouble with the authorities), I thought of ways to make the legal side more appealing.

A game is fair & good, but kids should learn from it to. So I turned to the incredible “Zelda” series (Nintendo’s 2nd most popular game after Super Mario) for inspiration. Very plot & condition-based, these lo-fi games capture the players attention, conveying an incredible amount of written information without ever being boring.

The conversion

Now that I had a general idea of what I was going to do, I had to figure out how I was going to do it… one thing was clear: I would attempt to create a unique environement. The result is a strange little world populated with little creatures that react to each other and interact with the player. Multi-layered arborescent dialogue changes according to the choices you’ve made. All this using AS2 classes and XML definitions coded from scratch.

The reality

Only the first 2 levels of comaDosis have been completed, but these feature full gameplay and dialogue density. So go ahead, use your arrow-keys!