Integration of a Physics Engine into an Adventure Game Platform

This paper presents the challenges and possibilities that arise from the integration of a 2D physics engine into an adventure game platform (i.e. engine and editor). This integration allows the use of a complex physics model within a narrative environment, thus increasing expressiveness and educational potential (through re-usability and increased challenge). In this work eAdventure is used as the adventure game platform and Box2D is used as the physics engine. While adventure games have been successfully applied in educational contexts from language learning to medicine, including a physics engine broadens the number of subjects that can be covered, thus increasing the scope and potential of the resulting games. This paper shows how such integration was implemented, and shows several mini-games that use the physics engine to provide visualization of physical experiments and attempt to increase player engagement. The mini-game approach allows for the easy integration of these new physics-based interactive scenarios within an adventure game narrative, where each mini-game can represent a puzzle or challenge to be solved.