“The Doctor and the Dalek” CBBC game forms part of the BBC’s ‘Make It Digital’ initiative.
And it's exactly the kind of hybrid we love at Somethin’ Else. It’s a ‘game with purpose’ — intrinsically fantastic to play, yet achieving something concrete and measurable. Playing the game delivers not just endorphins but specific parts of the UK’s school curriculum (‘Key Stage 2 and 3 programming’).
From the off, my team designed a game loop we were certain would do the job: skedaddle over Skaro (say) until you are blocked by something that can only be ed by upgrading your Dalek; the upgrading process would require completion of a ‘coding challenge.’
Easy words — and still not enough to describe a game someone can build.
Previous work at BBC Wales had already determined a 2D platform game would form the base genre for us to build on, and that the learning would be delivered by "junctions" with logic puzzles to solve in order to advance. Everyone loves a 2D platformer, but the demands of the curriculum required our examples of problem solving to be based in the real world, which is 3D (which would prove to be one of many creative challenges we solved in concert with the folks in Cardiff).
Technically, that’s easily accommodated. Build it in Unity — an environment widely used by developers looking to target the web as well as other platforms, and which now has excellent 2D and 3D . We would use 2D for the platformer and use a camera shift to reveal a 3rd dimension when necessary.
That’s more knowledge — but still not a game. Your build technology makes no difference whatsoever to the player; we still just had a game loop, a software development kit and a genre.
Our proposed way to make our loop and genre into a game was to build a Dalek that handled like a Rolls-Royce Wraith (ludicrously heavy but powerful, rewarding investment in learning how to control it). We’d build platforms that challenged the player in this way. We’d invent a simple ‘Visual Pseudocode’ to programme the Dalek when necessary. It would look like a believable programming environment, demanding real logic and operators, but would have a graphical way to enter instructions and be abstracted from the syntax of a general-purpose coding language. And working with the BBC we’d take the palette and some of the more sinister elements of the Capaldi-era Doctor Who to create a world for our levels to sit in. That’s something our team could build.
All this is before we’d even started to formally produce the game!
If you’re producing software to a definite date with a fixed budget and an immovable feature list you … well, you can’t. It can’t be done. Something has to move, some time. In this instance, the scrutiny of the Doctor Who team was understandably absolute, and the educational content couldn’t be approximate. A competing set of absolute requirements like this can be … problematic for development teams.
Luckily, our friends at the BBC are as -centrically minded as we are. With sterling help from pupils in Cardiff, Leeds and Midlothian testing the game as we designed and built it, we learned enough to take hard decisions for the right reasons in an agile way. The ‘Visual Pseudocode’ environment was cracked in collaboration with Rik Cross (Head of Education at Code Club) and Dr. Tom Crick (Senior Lecturer in Computing Science, Cardiff Metropolitan University). The game was co produced by Somethin’ Else and BBC Wales. The core production team was Mat Fidell, Richard Jenkins, Michelle Feuerlicht and Trevor Klein.
It’s something I’m inordinately proud of. Nine-year-old me, hacking games for the BBC Model B and hiding behind the sofa on a Saturday night, would probably not believe he’d get the privilege to work on this one day.
Paul Bennun is Chief Creative Officer at Somethin' Else
