Legend of the Seven Seas
Embark with your ship to sail the Seven Seas. Trade goods all around the world and learn from the local cultures there. That’s Legend of the Seven Seas in a nutshell.
Official site: student.waerdenborch.nl/loss (best viewed in internet explorer)
This was a serious game (back then called webbased edugame) project I worked on in highschool, and thus basically my first professional game development project! The assignment came from the iEARN (International Education And Resource Network) organization. We were asked to build an educational game that could be played online all over the world. Our concept was to use a basic trade game framework, with the Age of Discovery as setting, and enhance it with historical and geographical information for the various places around the world you visited.
I was the game designer on this project. I fleshed out the design; what ports to include, what products of trade are native to those areas, what could be done in a port, how the actual page flow worked. I wrote my first design document before I ever heard of the term.
The project got quite some positive attention, not in the least place because our team consisted of students from many different classes and grades. The following article appeared in a regional newspaper.
The headline says “Computer freaks from Holten go to Senegal”. As it turned out, iEARN was so contented with our project, we were allowed to present it at the iEARN world conference 2005 in Dakar, Senegal! A truly unforgettable experience, even more so as it was all about a game we built!