Energy City's Traffic Jam

Energy City's primary learning objective was to introduce kids to the difficulties of energy management. We wanted players to explore questions about where energy comes from and why we use the sources we do. We also wanted players to be able to devise a successful energy strategy all their own and give them the freedom to produce very different results from one another. To achieve these goals we included a wide variety of energy sources in the game. We also developed a number of options for conservation (to save energy) parallel to the sources (to create energy). Two of these conservation methods were fuel cell cars and fuel cell buses.

We knew from the start of development that the city needed to visually change as the player introduced new conservation methods. Gardens appear on the roofs of buildings, bike paths appear around the city, and recycling billboards pop up. What we were missing was streets full of traffic.

There was nothing too terribly difficult about introducing traffic into the project (even late in its development cycle); however, there was one really striking problem: the amount of processing time needed to update, sort, mask, and render the traffic within the city proper was just too much for the average school computer to handle. Energy City was already pushing the limits with large amounts of detailed graphics and animations, so the addition of traffic made the entire game grind to a halt. We desperately wanted to show traffic (and fuel cell vehicle upgrades for players who purchased them), but we couldn't afford to make the system requirements too high.

What's a developer to do in this situation? Iterate, of course! So that's what we did. Almost every week for the rest of the project, traffic was implemented in a different and hopefully more optimized way. In the end, though, all of the options were either too processor-intensive or impractical.

It was sad having to remove traffic from the game, as it gave each city much more motion and life. At the end of the day, though, the experience as a whole is much more important than any one graphical effect. The game's mission is to teach kids (and adults) about energy management, and if that means sacrificing traffic, well...we can all just ride our bikes.

This has been a co-reminiscence of Arther Low and Rick Horton.