Architects Develop Games To Prevent Obesity, Diabetes

Houston-based architect and graphic design firm Archimage has begun work on a collaborative project with the Children's Nutritional Research Center of Houston's Baylor College of Medicine to develop a pair of sci-fi adventure video games - Nanoswarm: Invasion from Inner Space and Escape from Diab - aimed at helping to prevent obesity and type II diabetes in children. The goal is to create fun games that also educate children on how to make healthier choices in their everyday lives. What at first seems like an odd fit for a business such as Archimage, turns out to be in line with the expertise of the architects and designers working for the company thanks to their individual talents in working with computer graphics and related software packages such as Autodesk 3ds max, Google's SketchUp and Adobe Photoshop, as well as more specialized programs including Apple Final Cut Pro, Leadwerks 3D World Studio, Ceebas Final Render, Microsoft Visual Studio, Torque Shader Engine, netMercs Codeweaver and Perforce. "Architects spend a lot of time in school building models and doing presentations," commented Richard Buday, Archimage's president. "We are storytellers; we are world builders." Applying those same skills to an application like computer games is just another step, he says. "You have to learn the world of filmmaking, but it feels like an extension of what we are supposed to do." Funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the two video games are currently scheduled to begin testing in the next few months. Provided the games produce the expected positive results in children, the project team will be able to secure another two years of funding to continue development towards final versions to be released to retail. More information is available by reading the complete overview article on Cadalyst. More information about Archimage can be found on the company's official website.