Senior Project - BioKid

Throughout the last six years, The Wild Divine Project has developed different health and wellness games using their biofeedback device, known as the "Lightstone". The Lightstone was developed for home use by professionals in biofeedback therapy. The device gathers the heart-rate-variability and skin-conductance-level of the user, which are, respectively, the change in heart-rate and skin moisture over time.

Wild Divine's currently available game products -- "The Passage" and "Wisdom Quest" -- are divided into "events", which are interactive scenarios. An "event" begins with some instruction on the kind of breathing to do or the mindset to be in and then allows the player to see progressive sequences of an animation as they succeed in the task. Although these games have been successful, many families would like their children to be able to participate as well; however, the current games are too difficult for children to master. Children love the graphical style and mystical theme of the old games, but found the tasks too difficult to complete. Thus, Wild Divine wanted to reach a new audience of 8-12 year olds.

The project addresses these issues by creating a game that is fun and kid-friendly, while still keeping the Wild Divine game-themes in mind. It transforms the Wild Divine "events" into a more fluid game experience. It also uses fantasy elements and characters from previous games. The game is a 2D, top-down (Zelda-like) view. Because the Lightstone is clipped onto one hand of the user, rendering them unable to type well, the game is primarily mouse-driven. The aim of the BioKid project isn't just to make a wellness-game, but to make a game framework upon which Wild Divine could easily create and edit future games of their own design.

The project is developed in the Flash environment, using Action Script 2.0. It also uses a C++ module to connect to the Lightstone biofeedback device via a USB port. The game can be played on both PC and Macintosh platforms.