Hi all! Math professor here (The Random Professor on YouTube) looking for my next frontier.
Hoping to build a math-based open-world game (if you’ve read Stephenson’s Diamond Age, then imagine Version 0.00001 of that…).
New(ish) to developing computer games. (Anyone remember David Ahl’s “BASIC Computer Games” and his “Big Computer Games”? Yeah, I had those…)
Why make a new math game when there’s a lot out there? My answer is that a lot of games require math to progress…but the math is an add-on and incidental to the game play: For example, you get to a Troll Bridge, and the Troll demands you solve a quadratic equation before moving on. This has the effect of making math a task, rather than something enjoyable.
(My example of a game where this isn’t true is Battleship: here the math is intimately connected with winning the game.)
Your concept sounds great. But do you have a more precise idea of how it’d work?
Like a game based on a mathematical concept, for example machines or people who are like functions, and all the game is about this concept?
or more like a lot of different maths concepts which are like tasks in the open world, but that make sense inside the world itself, for example you need to calculate where this character will arrive in order to meet him…?
BTW, Raymond Smullyan made riddle books where maths are approached in a game format, reality context. Like maths transformations are birds that call and reply to each others. It quickly becomes hard level for me but it’s a pleasant approach. Just let you know in case you don’t know