Marsh & Cope: The Bone Wars

Indianapolis, IN

We are a multidisciplinary team of students from different backgrounds making an educational video game with the Indianapolis Children's Museum. We want to make a game that balances entertainment and education, to promote that learning can be interesting and enjoyable. We are in the process of making a game over The Bone Wars, or more specifically, the feud between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. Both were pioneers in the field of paleontology in the 19th-century and greatly contributed to modern day paleontology with their discovery of 147 different dinosaur species. Our primary goal is to teach children the feud between Marsh and Cope and their influence on the field of paleontology, but we still want it to be engaging and fun. The game will be a hot-swap multiplayer game intended for two players. It will be a variable phase strategy game in which each player has to manage their resources effectively in order to gain the most fame by the end of the game. Our team will be using Java with the PlayN library for the production code and will be compiled for both Java and HTML5. Right now our target audience is for kids between 10 and 13 years of age.