Adventure Academy

Educational MMO

I worked as an Associate Designer for the metagame on Adventure Academy. General duties included quest/item authoring and implementation, bug fixing, and pitching quests and design ideas.

The goal for the metagame quests was not only to entertain the player, but also to draw them towards certain educational activities and points of interest. I pitched a series of quests given by the math professor — they would have to solve a riddle, whose solution would be a location within the world. This would work to:

Engage the player’s mind with riddles
Show the player interesting locations/objects around the map

I implemented a number of “racing”-style quests, where the player had to pass through some number of gates. I designed the routes and gate/item placement so that:

the race could be run in either direction
the next objective was obviously visible from the previous objective
there was, when possible, more than one route to take
there would be a potential tradeoff for picking up speed boosts
the player would pass points of interest they might be inclined to revisit after ocmpleting the race