Game Development Studio

Developer Profile: eduweb

Eduweb develops award-winning digital learning activities about art, history, science and technology. With a mission to create exciting and effective learning experiences, they've really taken to Unity.

Who are you?

I'm Dave Schaller, founder and principal of eduweb, a small firm based in St. Paul, Minnesota. My background is in writing – I had a mostly unsuccessful career as a freelance writer in the early 1990s – plus some photography and filmmaking. Then I got into exhibit writing for muse that hit the sweet spot where learning theory, digital technology, and fun meet. ums... and then the Web came along and I jumped aboard, while you could still learn the basics in an evening. The Web let me draw on my meager skills and interests in a fascinating new way. (Well, interactive CD-ROMs did the same in the early 1990s, but that was before I switched to a Mac and succumbed to the lure of multimedia.)

What kind of work does your company do?

We develop digital learning games and interactives, mainly doing custom projects for museums, zoos, and aquariums around the U.S. We just marked ten years in business. We've been lucky enough to work with some of the top museums in the country, learning about everything from archaeology to zooxanthellae.

Our work started out strictly focused on the Web, but has broadened to include CD-ROM and kiosk projects over the years. We're making real-world games a central focus now   games that look and feel and act like commercial games, but with real ecological or historical content.

What projects are you working on and what are their goals?

We have two Unity projects underway currently. The bigger one is WolfQuest, in which players become a gray wolf and try to survive in the wilderness. We're partneing with the Minnesota Zoo and have obtained funding from the National Science Foundation to make this a compelling game that kids and teenagers will want to play in their free time. We want players to discover what it feels like to be a wolf and, even briefly, think about the world from a wolf's perspective. Players will be able to hunt elk, find a mate, fight other wolves to establish a territory, start a family, and raise pups. Ultimately, "survival" means passing your genes on to the next generation. We've got a launch date of December 2007 – though we reserve the right to add missions after launch. The game will be offered as a free download, thanks to the NSF funding.

We've also just started a second project using Unity. We're working with Colonial Williamsburg to develop a game about everyday life on the eve of the American Revolution. Players will assume a role (a wealthy gentry, slave, carpenter's apprentice, etc.) and live that person's life for a day. As with WolfQuest, we're applying the standard conventions of computer role-play games to nonfiction content. Each character will have an overall quest (secure an inheritance, bring a debtor to court, etc.) along with a number of smaller tasks and challenges. You have to go around town, talk to NPCs, and figure out how to accomplish those tasks. Alas, unlike WolfQuest, there won't be any fighting. By 1774, duels were simply not that common (Burr-Hamilton notwithstanding).

Which apps are you using?

Mainly Unity, Maya, and Photoshop, plus Illustrator, SoundStudio and a few other apps. Though as the producer, I spend most of my day in Word and Mail   and on our wiki, which is a great tool for collaboration on our design documents.

How is it coming along?

We originally planned WolfQuest as a Shockwave game, so you can imagine how excited we are about what Unity can do. It far exceeds what we pictured when we wrote the grant, in visual quality, scope, and depth. The gameplay calls for fairly sophisticated wolf behaviors and social interactions, but we're finding that Unity is certainly capable of handling it all.

What has been the best part of the Unity experience?

Good tools are so critical to good work   both a good product and a good experience making that product. Unity is about as easy to use as you could imagine for such a powerful and complex tool. And having the OTEE team just an email away is awesome   mostly for the quick assistance they provide, but also for the fraternal feeling it creates.

We've also benefited from the tremendous talent in the Unity community. I can't recall a community forum as encouraging and helpful as Unity's. The community has been a font of freely-shared expertise   and of talent. We've found several experienced Unity developers for our development team on the forum and IRC.

What are the biggest obstacles?

WolfQuest is an order of magnitude more ambitious than anything we've done before, so it took us a little while to ramp up and build our team. Coming from a 2D world, trying to get a grip on the art pipeline of 3D has been daunting. The learning curve of understanding meshes, textures, skeletons, normals, etc., has been fairly steep. The fact that Unity lets you preview both art and animations in the IDE has been a big help.

We're full steam in development now. I'm sure we'll grapple with many obstacles in the coming months, but we're feeling good about our game design and choice of Unity to execute it.