Overview
Over three years, Pansimula contracted and delivered four educational titles to Legends of Learning, a platform that brings STEM material into K-12 classrooms as games. The constraint on all four was the same: the teaching has to happen through the mechanics rather than in text between levels.
My role
Gameplay systems on three of the four, content on the fourth. On Bid for Life I built the animal behaviours the simulation runs on: the bower bird courtship and display logic, the fish and bear species, and the flocking AI. The player controller and animation layer on Grow Hop are mine, along with the environmental systems the platforming depends on: rainclouds, raindrops, aphids and platform behaviour. On Malfunction I built the core loop and object lifecycle, the game and spawn managers, scene object management, and the asteroid, rocket and explosion systems. Dance of Atoms is the exception: my work there was the atom and molecule prefabs the bonding mechanic runs on, not the systems around them. All four were team builds on a shared studio codebase.
Malfunction (2019)
Math and science tower defense for grades 6-12. Players answer questions to defend a city from asteroid impacts. The game teaches through mechanics rather than exposition: correct answers unlock defensive mechanics, wrong answers provide corrective feedback within the game world. Released on the Legends of Learning platform.
Grow Hop (2018)
Biology platformer for grades 2-4. Players guide a plant through the stages of photosynthesis, and sunlight, water and soil are the platforming resources rather than topics the game pauses to explain. Running short of one is a level-design problem the player has to solve.
Dance of Atoms (2017)
Chemistry puzzle game for grades 7-10. Players arrange atoms into molecules following real bonding rules. Completing molecules earns points. Incorrect combinations provide corrective feedback. The gameplay mechanics reflect actual chemical bonding rules, making the game both educationally sound and mechanically interesting.
Bid for Life (2017)
Evolution strategy game for grades 9-11. Players manage animal reproductive strategies across resource management scenarios, learning evolutionary concepts through gameplay trade-offs. Simulation systems reflect actual biological trade-offs: energy versus reproduction, cooperation versus competition. The game explores different evolutionary strategies through scenario-based gameplay.
Contracts and delivery
All four shipped on time and on budget, onto school hardware that was usually old and never specified in advance. The first contracts were royalty-based, which means the studio builds the thing and the platform owns it. Later ones retained our IP. What changed between the two wasn’t the code. It was having four delivered titles to point at.