Space cats take aim at COVID-19
St. Catharines gaming company uses $20,000 grant to spread pro-science and pro-social messaging about pandemic
Saving lives, one game at a time.
Devil’s Cider Games was formed by four ex-schoolmates who worked together so well on their final project in the game development course at Niagara College that they decided to take it to the next level. They started the company in 2018.
To date, they only have one release of their own, a free Android game called “Morse Chromozone” in which the player uses Morse code to teleport a person from point A to point B.
But things are moving along, however. They recently won a $20,000 grant after submitting a Covid-19-inspired prototype called “Cat Colony Crisis” to Indiecade, a juried festival for independent games.
The four-person team of programmers Paul Boyko and Chris Lyons, artist Christine Harte and programmer and artist Chelsea Saari developed it during a two-week game-jam competition called Jamming the Curve.
“You are on a space ship that has a group of space-faring cats that are living on it. They are controlled by AI (artificial intelligence),” said Boyko.
“They go about their daily routine and there is a disease outbreak that happens, so you have to use contact tracing, watching for symptoms and testing and isolation in order to try and limit the spread of disease around the ship,” he added.
It’s designed to promote prosocial and pro-science concepts such as the benefits of social distancing, he said.
Out of 51 festival submissions, winners in each of five categories won $1,000. They then had an opportunity to win a $20,000 (U.S.) game development grant from the Labx division of the National Academy of Science in the United States.
Devil’s Cider Games won the grant last October.
Since then the St. Catharines-based team has been hard at work preparing for its release this Tuesday. The game will be
free for people to download and play.
“Because of the importance of the messaging, we decided that we would forego any additional money from it,” said Boyko. “The $20,000 in game development terms is peanuts, I’m pretty sure we worked well under minimum wage to get this done.
“We are all co-owners of the company so I guess there’s nothing wrong with us doing that,” he quipped.
“We want to get as many people playing it and we want to help be part of the solution, so if that means putting out a free game for people to re-enforce these messages, we are fine with that.”
During the game development, the company had talks with people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’ve actually sat down and had meetings with people from the CDC in the United States who have seen our game, who have played it and who have given us feedback on whether we are hitting the right pro-social, pro-science messaging,” said Boyko.
“Cat Colony Crisis” is being released for PC, Apple IOS and Linuxo perating systems including through Steam, WEBGL, Itch, the Google Play app store and Apple Store.
Meanwhile, the team at Devil’s Cider Games has been working with some other local gaming companies.
“We’ve been working on a game called “The Veil: Shadow of the Crown” by Falling Squirrel Inc. in St. Catharines,” said Boyko.
“It’s an action adventure game for the visually impaired. There is no visuals, the entire game world and the entire experience is navigated and experienced through sound.
The game should be coming out later this year for xbox and PC.
Devil’s Cider Games is also working on its own title, “Zero-g Gunfight.” Boyko is hoping the game will be completed by May 2022.
But right now the focus is on “Cat Colony Crisis.”
“It’s a game, it’s fun, it looks great but more importantly it’s trying to re-enforce positive decision-making in an era of COVID and any public-health crisis, that’s part of the beauty of it,” said Boyko.
“It’s great to see larger groups of people thinking how games can be a positive experience and help the world. As a game developer you feel you’re the only one that thinks that, and then seeing Phds at the CDC see that there can be some great value in positive messaging from gaming, it’s a very positive feeling to see that you’re not the only one that has a high opinion of what you do and the medium that you make.”