Metal Places

We were tasked with creating a kid-friendly educational game about metal, covering mining, metallurgy, and their cultural significance. The project required two versions of the same game, one focused on Asgata (Cyprus) and copper, and another on Sifnos and silver.

I strongly believe that educational games should teach through play, and not feel like quizzes or disguised lessons. After extensive brainstorming, I designed the game as a classic point and click adventure. The player controls an alien robot that crash-lands in a mining region and must repair its spaceship by going through the full metallurgical process: mining, extraction, smelting, and shaping. Each version adapts the setting, visuals, and interactions to its local context, Asgata with copper and Sifnos with silver. Information about mining, metallurgy, and some of their cultural aspects is presented through short exposition and in-game interactions, without turning the experience into a lesson or quiz.

While this is not my most technically complex project, it is one I am particularly proud of due to its design clarity and execution.

Key technical challenges solved:

• Working within a very tight budget and deadline
• Dynamic localization system supporting custom grammar rules per language
• Single codebase support for gameplay and visual variations across the two regional versions
• A custom, robust sequence based system inspired by DOTween and specialized for point and click logic