Shanghar Roy Kulananthan - Medical Illustration & Animation

Shanghar

Roy Kulananthan

Shanghar

Roy Kulananthan

My Work

About

Contact

I AM BOLUS - AN EDUCATIONAL DIGESTIVE SYSTEM GAME

MScBMC @ UofT

“I Am Bolus” is a concept of an educational interactive game that was created in Shehryar Saharan’s Advanced Media Design course. This project was a collaborative effort between myself, Qingyue Guo, Eve Higgins, Athena Li, Vicky Lin, Beverly Ng, and Raymond Zhang. In the game, you play as a bolus (a ball of chewed up food) traversing the digestive system on its journey towards "enlightenment." Your guide during this quest is an undigested Elder Enoki mushroom, who uses his experience to guide you through the different trials during the process of digestion. Learning objectives in the game are tailored towards the course curricula of high school and 1st year undergraduate students in Ontario and Canada.

TARGET AUDIENCE

High School and 1st Year Undergraduate Students

TOOLS USED

Unity

Maya

Blender

Procreate

Adobe After Effects

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Figma

Adobe Audition

Audacity

THE BEGINNING

From the beginning, we knew as a group that we wanted to create a video game. The idea of creating an interactive experience sounded so interesting to all of us. I was one of the people in our group that had played countless hours of video games growing up, and I, along with many others in the group had always thought it would be so cool to try and make one for ourselves. This course project was a perfect opportunity to try and make our own.

Our next task was to then figure out what the game would be about, and how we would be able to use the medium of video games to effectively provide an interactive educational experience for the player.

THE BEGINNING

TOPIC

The first step was to figure out what scientific/medical topic that the game could be focused upon. Some possibilities that we discussed as a group initially were the immune system, topics in virology and infection, CT scan injection protocols, and many others. We cast a wide net to see what stuck. Eventually, after a lot of discussions within our group, we settled on the idea of focusing on the human digestive system. This is because we felt that the topic of digestion and digestive anatomy would be an interesting one to incorporate into an educational video game setting.

RESEARCH

The subsequent research we did to flush out this idea was two-pronged:

determine core learning objectives that will need to be addressed in the game
determine strategies for using the video games as an educational tool

The first part of our research focused on examining course curricula and textbooks from various high schools and universities across Ontario and Canada. This helped us decide what particular topics within the broad concept of digestion would need to be covered within our game. We decided to keep our research constrained to courses targeted towards high school and 1st year university students, so as to keep our game streamlined towards the same audience.

RESEARCH

The subsequent research we did to flush out this idea was two-pronged:

determine core learning objectives that will need to be addressed in the game
determine strategies for using the video games as an educational tool

Figure 1:

An example of our data collection summary, examining different high school criteria for teaching the topics of the digestive system to high school students in Ontario.

Figure 1:

An example of our data collection summary, examining different high school criteria for teaching the topics of the digestive system to high school students in Ontario.

We found particular concepts repeated among all the different curricula we examined. Because of this commonality, we felt that these topics should be focused on in our game. This would allow the game to be good tool to teach these widely taught concepts among different school districts.

Figure 2:

A summation of the common topics related to the digestive system that is taught in schools across Ontario and Canada .

Figure 2:

A summation of the common topics related to the digestive system that is taught in schools across Ontario and Canada .

The second part of our research focused on understanding game-making strategy, especially how to use video games effectively as an educational tool. We spent a significant amount of time combing through research articles and summarized a few key principles that would guide the design of our game:

the GAME OBJECTIVES (the goals that the player has to achieve to beat the game) need to be aligned with the player/student's LEARNING OBJECTIVES (the educational topic that is being taught by the game). When these two are intrinsically integrated, this ensures that learning occurs while playing the game - i.e. learning how to play the game should in essence teach the player about the specific education topic (van der Linden, A. et al., 2019)
a game has various constructs that all influence the player's learning experience, as per Ishak S. et al. (2023). In particular
- INTRINSIC MOTIVATION is the player's desire to continue through the game. If a player is not interested in playing the game, they will not experience the full educational experience
- GAME FEATURES are the graphical elements in the game that visually stimulate the learner to increase interest and engagement
- ENGAGING GAME EXPERIENCE allows the player to have a positive experience and contributes to their enjoyment, thus increasing their motivation to complete the game.
providing the player with choices and allowing them to experiment with their decisions in the game incorporates an integrated form of learning in which the player learns through the consequences of their actions. Choices that result in a consequence and prevents the player from progressing in the game essentially confronts the player's pre-existing ideas, which then necessitates an alteration in the player's own theories and forces them to adopt a new one in order to progress through the game. In other words, moving past failure ensures that the player is learning (van der Linden et al., 2024).

As you can see, the literature makes it clear that player engagement is vital in the success of an educational video game. We can attest to this as well, from our own personal experience playing educational video games in the past. I have personally played games that became too "preachy" or didactic in the way concepts were relayed to the player, and I inevitably lost interest in playing the game.

One thought we had during our research was to create an achievement system that rewarded player exploration through the game. For example, if the player moved from the stomach level back into the esophagus, this would trigger what we referred to as a "pathological event", in this case triggering gastroesophagel reflux disease (GERD). This would change the game scenario and also provide a collection badge that would be displayed in the achievements menu that the player could look back at once collected. This badge would provide additional learning information about what GERD is and how it affects the digestive system. We felt this might be an interesting way to keep the player engaged in the game, even it they deviate from the intended game path. In a way, we wanted to reward the player for exploring the game rather than penalizing them because we felt that this would attract players who may prefer a nonlinear game path.

All in all, we knew that in order for our game to be successful, we would need to strike a balance between providing an adequate learning experience for the player while also maintaining their engagement so that they are motivated to complete the full educational experience in its entirety.

MEDIA AUDIT

With the knowledge gained from our preliminary research, we decided to conduct a media audit of different educational games. We decided to open this audit to any education game rather than limiting ourselves to games that are specifically focused on the digestive system. This is because our objective with this audit was to elucidate effective educational strategies within the role of video games, and this isn't necessarily limited to the topic of the digestive system. Some of the games we audited were Kerbal Space Program, White true learn(), In Digestion, and Kingsoft Typing. We loosely examined the games based on evaluation criteria outline in the Serious Games Evaluation Scale (Fokides, E. et al., 2019) in order to get a better sense of how different games apply different strategies to increase engagement and then determine if these strategies were effective in their educational goals. Here is an example of the evaluation of Kerbal Space Program:

MEDIA AUDIT

Figure 3:

An example of our data collection for the prelimiary media audit. This data represents the information collected on the game Kerbal Space Program.

Figure 3:

An example of our data collection for the prelimiary media audit. This data represents the information collected on the game Kerbal Space Program.

USER RESEARCH AND PERSONAS

Once we had a better idea of the type of game we wanted to create, we needed to spend time to figure out our audience and anticipate their behaviour so that we could design our game to align better with them. We figured that the user's drive to continue the game is driven by two main factors:

innate motivation to engage with the learning content
familiarity with digital gaming

Based on the spectrum created by these two variables, we created four user personas that we would use to represent subsets of our theoretical target audience.

Figure 4:

A graph formed by axes of a user's innate motivation to learn and their familiarity with gaming. This created four quadrants, which we personified as different user personas.

Figure 4:

A graph formed by axes of a user's innate motivation to learn and their familiarity with gaming. This created four quadrants, which we personified as different user personas.

We decided to focus our user persona examination on two extremes: Elio the Explorer and Pauli the Procrastinator. Elio has high curiosity and engage well with learning experiences, but has little to no experience with gaming. On the other hand, Pauli has very high familiarity with video games, but doesn't have as high of an inclination to participate in learning experiences. We needed to understand both of these users in order to design a game that would engage both of them.

Figure 5:

The user personas we examined in our user research: Elio the Explorer (left) and Pauli the Procrastinator (right)

Figure 5:

The user personas we examined in our user research: Elio the Explorer (left) and Pauli the Procrastinator (right)

Elio's limitations, in terms of using the game, stemmed from his limited experience with video games. This meant that our game would need to incorporate simple and intuitive UI/UX with more explicit guidance.

On the other hand, Pauli is only focused on learning the necessary material and nothing more, but we knew that he wouldn't have any trouble figuring out the game mechanics. This would mean our game would need to be designed in a way that enforced learning in a way that engaged someone like Pauli. This would involve minimizing extraneous cognitive load during gameplay and using repetition to enforce learning.

In summary, we needed to create game that had a balance between learning and engagement. Learning would need to be efficient, but if the player chose to delve deeper into the learning material, they could. Also, educational information would need to be presented in multiple forms, for example through gameplay as well as through didactic-style learning in menus that the player can refer to later if needed. Drawing from these conclusions, we kept the idea of Elio and Pauli in the back of our minds during the game design process as we continued forwards with the production.

NARRATIVE

At this point in the process, we felt we had gathered enough information to begin planning out the game. In particular, we wanted to spend time deciding on the type of game that we wanted to make. One concept that resonated with all of us was the use of narrative in the gameplay. Many of us in the group enjoyed story-rich games and we wanted the same for our game. We also felt that using an interesting idea for a narrative would act as a strategy to create an engaging game experience for the player, keeping them invested in the game.

We then began brainstorming ideas for game narratives that would act as the framework upon which we could build out the rest of the game. After many different ideations and discussions, we eventually settled on the idea of a character-driven story in which the player plays as a monk-bolus (a chewed up ball of food) who is on a pilgrimage through the digestive system in order to reach "enlightenment". Throughout the game, the player will be accompanied by an undigested enoki mushroom, who we refer to endearingly as Elder Enoki. He uses his knowledge of the digestive system to guide you towards nirvana.

We felt that this narrative was not only unique compared to the plethora of other games/media that used different metaphors to insert a narrative into digestive system education, but we also felt that our narrative was engaging and interesting, as it provided the goal of enlightenment for the player and the bolus character.

STYLE

We relied on the narrative component to dictate the style that we wanted to pursue during the game's development. In particular, we wanted to aim for an "airy" and "soft, pastel" look that evoked a sense of calm that we felt would illustrate a monk's path towards enlightenment. In addition, we wanted to the game to be a 3D game with a low-poly style. There were a few reasons for this: one being that we were all interested in implementing 3D into our first game primarily for the experience of making a 3D game. The choice to use low-poly assets was a solution to combat the restrictive time frame to complete the project - relying on low-poly assets would reduce production time significantly compared to if we had chosen to use highly sculpted and detailed models instead. We first began by creating a moodboard to create a foundation that we could refer back to when making design choice throughout the game's development.

Figure 6:

Our initial moodboard

Figure 6:

Our initial moodboard

Later on in the game development process, we also created a style guide upon which we could refer to for the specific UI designs and font choices. This informed many of the design decisions associated with a lot of the 2D elements in the game, such as the menu screen and the HUD elements in the game.

Figure 7:

UI Style Guide

Figure 7:

UI Style Guide

PRE-PRODUCTION

Finally! We can begin the game design. But wait! We first needed to figure out what each person in the group would be doing. This inevitably allowed us to delegate different roles to different people and reduced the workload for each team member.

PRE-PRODUCTION

Figure 8:

Team Role Designations

Figure 8:

Team Role Designations

Now we can finally begin the actual game design! Phew!

One of the first tasks we tackled in pre-production was the design of the characters. We created initial concept art, and as you can tell from the image below, the Elder Enoki was originally meant to be an undigested corn kernel. We opted to switch an Enoki mushroom to provide a more unique and distinctive character silhouette for this character.

Figure 9:

Initial Character Design

Figure 9:

Initial Character Design

Upon further iterations, we arrived at much more refined characters that matched the style that we wanted for both the bolus and the enoki characters.

Figure 10:

Refined Character Designs

Figure 10:

Refined Character Designs

The next task involved designing the levels. While we were initially ambitious and wanted to complete multiple levels for our project, we soon realized that this would be very unrealistic given the limited time. Instead, we opted to choose one section of the digestive system and create a minimum viable product (MVP) for this level. We conducted a preliminary analysis of the proposed levels and examined which ones would be best to focus on for the project's MVP. The idea was that if we created a minimum viable product that utilized many different concepts and game mechanics, we would have an MVP that would be representative of other proposed aspects of the game. Based on our analysis, we opted to design the stomach level.

Figure 11:

Deciding on the game level for the minimum viable product (MVP)

Figure 11:

Deciding on the game level for the minimum viable product (MVP)

Within the stomach level, there were three learning objectives that needed to be covered, which meant that three "minigames" needed to be employed, each aligned with one of these learning objectives. The learning objectives include:

Initiating gastric juice secretion
Chemical breakdown of the bolus
Physical churning of the bolus/chyme

Again, time was not on our side, and so we were forced to limit our MVP down to completing only the first of the three minigames - gastric juice secretion. This in itself involved 4 game mechanics, referred to as "tasks".

Collect gastrin from the G-cell
Activate parietal and chief cells that will secrete hydrochloric acid and pepsinogen, respectively
Activate goblet cells that will secrete mucous that will protect the stomach
Check the bolus' level of digestion, to see if they can pass onto the next level

The image below illustrates a breakdown of the levels, minigames and tasks specific to the MVP that we were aiming to create for this project. Don't pay attention to the completed level design in this picture just yet, or else you'll ruin the surprise!

Figure 12:

Breakdown of the gameplay for the minimum viable product (MVP)

Figure 12:

Breakdown of the gameplay for the minimum viable product (MVP)

Based on this, we created a concept of how we wanted the layout of the stomach level. In it, we would have a pool where the first stage of digestion would take place. The cells associated with the tasks for the gastric secretion phase of this level would be represented by statues. Each of the statues would need to be unique and identifiable from a glance. Using shape language to define unique silhouettes for each statue type was our primary way of making the statues unique.

Figure 13:

Concept for the layout of the stomach level. Note the statues that represent the different digestive cells in the stomach. Also note the pool labelled "mini game #2" where gastric juices would be secreted in preparation for mini-game 2 - chemical breakdown of the bolus

Figure 13:

Figure 14:

Concept for the various statues representing different digestive cells in the stomach.

Figure 14:

Concept for the various statues representing different digestive cells in the stomach.

STORYBOARDING

Within the pre-production phase, a significant amount of time was spent on storyboarding the sequence of events that would occur during gameplay. While the game itself is nonlinear and the player can choose to play the game however they want, a particular sequence of events must completed in sequence in order to progress to the next part of the level.

We made the decision to create a storyboard for the entire stomach level, including all three minigames, not just the first one. This is because understanding how the scene will progress will determine how the it needs to look in past. In this way, we can create a full storyboard of the stomach and know that any decision we make won't deviate from this proposed plan.

STORYBOARDING

Figure 15:

Storyboards for the game narrative

Figure 15:

Storyboards for the game narrative

PRODUCTION

The next phase of development is to actually begin building the assets in 3D. We used Maya and Blender to model out the 3D assets to be used in the game. We then used Blender's texture painting features to unwrap and colour the assets. Then everything was imported into Unity to assemble the game.

PRODUCTION

Figure 16:

Texture painting the stomach level in Blender

Figure 16:

Texture painting the stomach level in Blender

Figure 17:

Assembling assets in Unity

Figure 17:

Assembling assets in Unity

Certain assets were built directly inside of Unity. In particular these were things that relied on Unity's shader engine to create VFX and particle systems. Some examples of these assets include the fountains, the fog around the level, the God rays, the dangerous bubbles, and the judgment tube.

Figure 18:

God ray assets created using Unity's Particle System.

Figure 18:

God ray assets created using Unity's Particle System.

Let's go into a bit more detail about how we used Unity to create one of these assets, in particular the fountains. Firstly, the fountains were actually composed of 3 different parts: the fountain cone, the base ripples, and the mist ring around the base of the cone. These 3D assets were created in Blender and imported into Unity.

Figure 19:

Base meshes for the fountains. From the left, we have the fountain cone, the base ripples, and the mist ring.

Figure 19:

Base meshes for the fountains. From the left, we have the fountain cone, the base ripples, and the mist ring.

We then used Unity's shader graph to create the animated materials that would sell the effect of water moving through the fountain. In the case of the fountain cone, the material had to be layered on top of itself, to give the effect of waves moving on top of the water underneath it.

Figure 20:

The different materials used for the fountains. From the left, we have the the fountain cone material, the mist ring material, and the ripples material.

Figure 20:

The different materials used for the fountains. From the left, we have the the fountain cone material, the mist ring material, and the ripples material.

There was also a 2D component in the production phase. This focused on creating assets for the UI menus and HUDs, the pathology collection badges, and even creating 2D character assets that we would use to create a 2D cutscene at the beginning of the game.

Figure 19:

Examples of the different 2D assets that were created. Starting from the left, we have menu items, pathology collectible badges, and assets for the cutscene.

Figure 19:

Examples of the different 2D assets that were created. Starting from the left, we have menu items, pathology collectible badges, and assets for the cutscene.

THE GAME

And now, for the game! Click on the image below to open a new tab and play the game yourself! Note: unfortunately, the game is not optimized to work on mobile, but hopefully this is something we can address in the future.

If you are unable to access the game itself, here is a video that show the full gameplay of the demo.

SOURCES

Fokides E, Atsikpasi P, Kaimara P, Deliyannis I. Let players evaluate serious games. Design and validation of the Serious Games Evaluation Scale. ICGA Journal: The Journal of the Computer Games Community. 2019;41(3):116-137. doi:10.3233/ICG-190111
Ishak, S. A., Hasran, U. A., & Din, R. (2023). Media Education through Digital Games: A Review on Design and Factors Influencing Learning Performance. Education Sciences, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13020102
van der Linden, A., van Joolingen, W. R., & Meulenbroeks, R. F. G. (2019). Designing an Intrinsically Integrated Educational Game on Newtonian Mechanics. In M. Gentile, M. Allegra, & H. Söbke (Eds.), Games and Learning Alliance (pp. 123–133). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11548-7_12
Van Der Linden, A., Meulenbroeks, R. F. G., & Van Joolingen, W. R. (2024). Learning Newtonian mechanics with an intrinsically integrated educational game. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 40(4), 1500–1510. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12966

Navigation

Home

About

My Work

Contact

srkulananthan@gmail.com