The Counting Kingdom – Preview

June 14, 2014 Leave a comment

The kids are finally starting their summer “break.” As a cruel and unusual father, I find that it is now the perfect time to start piling up educational material to keep my children’s young minds sharp and ready to learn. Thanks to “The Counting Kingdom”, math practice will be a bit more fun for my boys during the summer doldrums.

The Counting Kingdom 1The Counting Kingdom is a turn-based tower defense game where a young wizard is defending castles using his mathematical magic skills. Each turn, the player can select a single monster or a group of monsters with a set of available spells. The catch is that the monsters have numbers on them, and the sum of all monsters selected must equal the spell you are casting.

Thankfully, since this is turn-based, you have plenty of time to mentally calculate the best way to clear as many monsters off the screen as possible. You also have other tools available such as combining each of your three available spell cards to come up with bigger spell values to use, or you can use potions that will adjust the value of each monster. And since this is a game targeted towards 6 to 9 year olds, making mistakes prompts a helper to aid in totaling the selected monsters and their values on the screen.

The Counting Kingdom 2As you progress in levels, the number of monsters increases as well as the values of each monster. At the beginning you are summing numbers from 1 to 6. By halfway into the game, you are regularly summing double digits. By the end of the game, the amounts being added up, along with potions and available spell combos would start to give most adults trouble. Though, this is a great exercise for adults who have trouble splitting a dinner check, especially if you throw in a coupon or two.

The art style is very charming and the monsters positively adorable, it was a delight to see my nine-year-old and six-year-old tackling the early levels.

What Worked: I can tell that there was a lot of good thought put behind the numbers generators. Spells that are available and monsters that appear never feel completely random. You always have moves available. In later levels, this numbers generator is even smart enough to force you to make combinations. At the end of the round, the numbers generator always makes sure you can clean up stragglers. The game always feels fair even though it is quite challenging. The entire game resonates charm from its music and production values as well.

What Didn’t Quite Work: The main problem with the game is that the story mode’s difficulty curve needs to be adjusted for different ages. My six-year-old gave up once the game started introducing potions and he couldn’t handle the added variations. My nine-year-old was exhausted after about 8 levels of mental math. For myself, I barely squeaked by the last levels of the game and unlike my sons, I’m a full-blooded Asian math whiz. I couldn’t imagine my nine-year-old completing the story mode for the game. And even with a lowered difficulty curve, it just feels like the game needs more incentives for younger audiences to push through. The game does have an added “free play” mode with adjustable difficulty, but it doesn’t have the same sense of achievement as unlocking the next castle in story mode.

Both my nine-year-old and I tried to use the potions to adjust the values of our spell cards and didn’t realize it only worked on monsters. So we broke a potion when we didn’t intend to. Also, the game only allows one profile at a time. The developer had to show me a hidden button to restart the game from scratch so that my six-year-old could take it from the top. Also, in the current build, the screen displays bonuses for clearing the entire screen for enemies with bonus points, but there are currently no indicators how those bonus points affects your ending score or number of stars that you receive.

As a developer, I know it is also very expensive and time-consuming to create new content, but I thought it is important to note that the main character of the game is a young boy. I seriously hope that the developer considers allowing the player to select a young girl to play, especially since we want to encourage more girls to go into STEM fields.

About the Game from the Dev: The Counting Kingdom is an educational game for kids 6-8 that is magically fun and will keep kids coming back for more.

Join the Wizard’s Apprentice on a magical journey through the Counting Kingdom! Cast spells to defend the castles from waves of attacking monsters, discovering more powerful spells as you go. You’ll have to dig deep to come up with the best strategy for defending the kingdom – do you have what it takes to repel the monsters and become a powerful wizard?

Join Alpha Testing now to be one of the first people to play The Counting Kingdom!

About the Dev: We believe in making educational games that kids want to play. Our team has a deep background in creating entertaining games and a strong panel of advisory educators, and together we’re making games that are engaging, educational, and just plain fun.

GlizzardDeveloper: Little Worlds Interactive

Game Website: The Counting Kingdom

Release Date: Available in Alpha on Steam: Early Access

Filed under Previews

Luna’s Wandering Stars

May 18, 2014 2 Comments

Lunas Wandering Stars - PlanetsMy nine-year-old crashed through the door one day excitedly demanding a piece of paper and pencil.

“Why do you need them?” asked my wife as she handed them over.

“SCIENCE!” And, off he went back outside writing down his observations.

I guess it doesn’t help that both my sons have been on a MythBuster’s binge on Netflix and have grown an incredible fascination with science. My eldest has been very interested in studying airplanes and flight, so when I heard about “Luna’s Wandering Stars”, it was the perfect opportunity to see what he thought of this educational game.

“Luna’s Wandering Stars” is a series of challenging physics puzzles staring our moon, “Luna.” Luna visits the nine planets* of the Solar System solving various physics puzzles. Each planet presents a unique set of challenges centered around a playable theme using Newtonian Physics. In the early levels, you launch Luna on various trajectories, much like “Angry Birds: Space.” In later levels, you are only given the ability to use thrusters to change your trajectory. And in another set of levels you can “change the gravitational constant of the universe”, with a flick of the mouse. And that is just for the starting planets! There are six more fun and interesting themes to discover.

To complete a level, you have to guide, launch, or boost Luna to collect asteroids. Once you collect enough asteroid mass, you pass the level. This can be easily accomplished, but the real challenge is collecting gold asteroids which unlock the other planets in the Solar System. To complicate matters, for every asteroid that is collected, Luna gains mass. This can affect the momentum and velocity of Luna in mid-flight, making it much more challenging than merely flinging birds in zero gravity.

*Kid's today aren't told the true story of Pluto, the missing planet

*Kid’s today aren’t told the true story of Pluto, the missing planet

The presentation is top-quality with beautiful space backgrounds and epic music encouraging you to step up to the challenge. To counter the almost overblown feeling of awesomeness is an ironic self-awareness: the game’s instructions and narration is loaded with dripping sarcastic humor. There are also a lot of quotes from all over geek-culture. I have to admit that I had to research the Shakespeare quote, but I laughed out loud when I saw a “Community” reference. It was hard explaining to my nine-year-old what was so funny with the commentary at the completion of each level and even with the narrator’s jabs for making epic failures.

Some of the levels are pretty challenging, and after about 30 minutes of deep concentrated play, my nine-year-old had to take a break. I continued to play, and there were even a few levels I had to skip or had to accept a less than perfect solution just to move onto the next challenge. Mileage may vary, but I thought that this game was perfect for teens to adults in terms of challenge.  However, one of the things I found missing was some sort of indicator that I had unlocked the next planet. An indicator for when the next planet unlocks is not only just for a good reference point, but for me it serves as a motivator to keep trying for more gold asteroids.

Even failing still looks spectacular.

Even failing still looks spectacular.

Just when I had thought that I had discovered everything the game had to offer, I noticed another button on the Start Menu that I hadn’t clicked before. I clicked the “Custom” button. I was entirely oblivious to what that meant. I thought it was just an “options” screen, but it turned out to be a full-fledged level editor! Here, I could recreate and expand on levels that I liked in the original game itself. And then my jaw dropped even further when I learned that I could also upload my levels and download levels created by other people to try. In fact, someone had already made and uploaded a “shooting” arcade-style survival game starring Luna.

Space FoundationIt made me wonder what else would be created if this game was given to a much larger audience, and I was very pleased to find out that “Luna’s Wandering Stars” is being featured at the Space Foundation Symposium later this week. I am certainly looking forward to seeing even more levels once more people start trying it out.

A week after our initial test run, my son was asking how gravity works. To help my son understand, I showed him a YouTube video of a professor using a spandex sheet to demonstrate what gravity fields look like. He watched as ball bearings made their little orbits on a warped surface representing “space-time.” Almost immediately, the lightbulbs in his head went off and he yelled, “That’s exactly like ‘Luna’s Wandering Stars’!” Suddenly, my nine-year-old son understood what the game was really all about: learning truths about science.

That’s what makes “Luna’s Wandering Stars” not just an excellent game with fun mechanics, a wicked sense of humor and a wide variety of levels and designs, but also a great educational experience.

Luna's IconLuna’s Wandering Stars was developed by Serenity Forge

IGTlogo-01$9.95 for not just a fun game, but for the lights going off in a curious child’s mind while learning about space and physics. It was worth infinitely more than the single CFL lightbulb I could get at the same price. (And less toxic for the environment!)

Luna’s Wandering Stars is Indie Gamer Team Approved.

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