Editor's
note: This Postmortem appears in the August issue of Game Developer magazine.In the fall
of 1998, Lucas Learning emerged from its shell with the offering of its
first educational software product, Star Wars DroidWorks. The game
combines first-person shooter game technology with solid educational content
to create something different: a thoughtful game that's actually fun and
helps kids to learn within the game medium.
In Star
Wars DroidWorks, you take on the role of a rebel spy disguised as
a Jawa droid engineer, assigned the mission of learning the art of droid
building. You use your skills in solving several physical puzzles, collecting
clues that lead you along the path to a secret factory, where Jabba the
Hutt has been making evil assassin droids for
the Empire. To defeat Jabba, you have to engineer droids that roll, jump,
walk, and run. In many cases, you have to build droids with special abilities
— they have to move heavy objects, see in the dark, or perform some special
task — and you have to explore and apply basic physical principles in
order to infiltrate the factory and re-program the assassin droids.
DroidWorks
met with rave reviews from family magazines, online educational sites,
teachers, kids, parents, and even from many hard-core gaming sites. We
did see a number of gamers scratching their heads and thinking "what's
the point?" but for the most part, people seemed to love it both for its
entertainment value and its educational value. Eventually, we won several
awards including the first-ever award for children's interactive software
from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the NewMedia Invision
gold medal in the children's category, the NewMedia Invision award in
the entertainment category (against "pure" entertainment titles including
Age of Empires, Unreal, and The X-Files), and the
1998 Codie award in the young adult category.
As
a company assembled to create a new kind of educational software, we knew
we couldn't create just another action game. In addition to the unique
challenges introduced by an educational bent, DroidWorks faced
the same technical, artistic, and design hurtles as strictly entertainment
computer games. We combined gaming styles as diverse as 3D puzzle games
used in Tomb Raider, engineering and outfitting games like Terra
Nova, adventure games like Monkey Island, and RPG games like
Diablo, and we took ambitious steps forward to tackle them all at
once.