Serious Game Engine Shootout
SIGMA – Built for Teaching and Learning “When we decided to start a serious game company five years ago, we looked at all the engines that were available and found that each lacked some of the key components needed for teaching and learning. And if they did have those capabilities, it would be prohibitively expensive to make products for the K-16 educational market, which we’d decided to target,” explains company founder and president, Dave McCool. “Rather than forcing a square peg into a round hole, we decided to build a new platform from the ground up that has integrated assessment, is transparent, affordable, modable and built for education from the start.” “Today, SIGMA is one of the only purpose-built, genre-independent serious games platforms,” according to McCool. “It seems everyone else built their platform favoring a particular type of game. Instead, we came at it from a pure software engineering perspective. Every game has graphics, an object system, an I/O system, a content store, so we built those pieces and then we made Making History to prove we got it right. But the next game made with SIGMA could be a 3D first-person shooter like Halo or something else that’s totally different. SIGMA is built to be modular, so you’re not locked into one genre.”
According to David Martz, Muzzy Lane’s vice president of sales, “We recognize that the economics of serious game development are challenging. Generally the education and military markets for serious games can’t support a consumer game budget – typically in excess of $5 million per title – yet they require similar production values and sophistication in order to engage students. With the development of SIGMA, we’ve solved the problem of being able to develop cost-effective, yet engaging serious games. And we can also support desktop or web-based deployment with the relevant infrastructure.” “The benefits of SIGMA are its inclusion of code modules to support serious games best practices, a teacher console, class builder and SCORM-compliant reporting. Games developed on our platform will be more cost effective, so developers can focus more of their time and budget on content and instruction, not the underlying technology. Muzzy Lane’s proprietary XML scripting language makes that all possible.”
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