Ero.Coli is a single-player 2D top-down adventure game where the hero, a tiny nano-robot, has to explore a living world, collect and combine functional DNA fragments in order to engineer and control the abilities of his bacterium companion.
During their adventure they will have to face obstacles and challenges with the help of synthetic biology. Our game aims to perfectly combine science education and an engaging gaming experience.
Our demo, currently under development, is a complete full level where the player can modify, adapt and optimise the skills of a bacterium in order to face a specific challenge and progress in the game map. This is possible by designing genetic devices from a crafting table, using synthetic biology 'recipes'. The player can chose to introduce the crafted devices inside the cell and have real-time and realistic feedback of these modifications. This is done thanks to a scientific simulation tool that has been developed for the game. The challenges are divided in 3 different levels of difficulty that are spread along the map : easy, medium, hard.
All the cell abilities and DNA sequences correspond to real-life data. This would allow scientist to reproduce in a lab what the player do in the game. Moreover, our simulation tool is extremely modular which means that people from the gaming or scientific communities can easily add new abilities, challenges, and DNA sequences to play with. Our long-term objective is to provide a free web-based game and editing tools to the players.
