“Tyto Online” cofounders Ryan Tropf, Caroline Lamarque and Paul Burgermeister, from left, watch as children play the prototype during One Spark, a crowd-funding festival in Jacksonville, Fla.
Early in-game screenshots show environments inside the biodomes of “Tyto Online.” Players complete quests to help the game’s scientists balance biodome ecosystems, which mimic grassland, rainforest and desert habitats.
Early in-game screenshots show environments inside the biodomes of “Tyto Online.” Players complete quests to help the game’s scientists balance biodome ecosystems, which mimic grassland, rainforest and desert habitats.THE PREMISEThree hundred years in the future, the prospects of life on Earth are bleak. The environment has been damaged practically beyond repair. The forests are gone, and the air is barely breathable. Clean water is practically a myth.Nations around the world have decided the only way to ensure mankind’s survival is to start over on another planet. Billions pack themselves onto enormous interstellar spaceships known as Pathfinders in forced evacuations and make the four-year interstellar voyage to the alien world of Ovo. Along with them, they bring small populations of Earth’s plant and animal species, which will be housed and nurtured in biodomes that replicate their native habitats.The first colony on Ovo is Espeth, a former research facility that has become a thriving community. It is also the home of Tyto Academy, a prestigious center of learning that accepts only the best and brightest students — the game’s players.Awakening from cryosleep, the players must assist Espeth’s scientists as they seek to learn more about their new world and to balance and sustain the ecosystems inside the colony’s massive biodomes. In the process, the students will gather information about the ecology of Ovo and Earth in the hopes of one day returning to and restoring their home world.LEARN MORETo find out more about Tyto Online, view gameplay footage, contribute to its development and read updates from developer Immersed Games, visit the Kickstarter page at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/immersed/tyto-online-learning-mmorpg. See an early gameplay video at Vimeo.com/101659510.
Lindsey Tropf and her team at Immersed Games have set themselves a fairly monumental task – and it’s not figuring out how mankind could survive on another planet or designing a balanced, extraterrestrial ecosystem.
Those burdens of fiction are practically featherweight compared to the real challenge of developing a massively multiplayer game — known as MMOs — in which players learn actual scientific lessons while also having fun.
On July 10, the Gainesville, Fla.-based games studio launched a month-long Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of “Tyto Online,” an role-playing game with a decided emphasis on “science” over “fiction.”
“We aren’t making a game where you either do fun game things or you do learning things — they are one and the same,” explains Tropf, who graduated from Lee University in 2008. “You learn by doing quests that are a large part of game play.