Arena was developed using the WebGL game engine Phaser. It is a purposeful adventure video game for informal, second language acquisition. The game drops players into a science fiction setting, a dangerous colony planet in the far future where Spanish is the main language. Players must learn Spanish to survive.

Objectives
Studies show that pairing formal language learning with supplemental informal language learning is a highly effective way to gain fluency. Our team created a vertical slice of a narrative-driven language learning video game in an effort to:
- Perform research into the effectiveness of mimicking foreign language immersion virtually.
- Apply game design principals and techniques to a real world project.
- Complete a functional vertical slice of the game.



Solutions
The team came together to first decide on our development platform, landing on, for a number of reasons, a web-based game engine called Phaser. Phaser was lean and customizable enough to fit our needs all while being powerful enough to handle the artwork we had planed for the game which would be tileset-based.
Over the course of a semester the development team wrote, play-tested, designed, and developed the intro sequence of the game The first level included several game states like combat and world interaction along with several puzzles and a number of environments.


Results
In addition to completing a full vertical slice of the game, the team was also able to, the following semester, present at the Whalen Symposium and our research poster was published at the iConference, an annual gathering of a broad spectrum of scholars and researchers from around the world.
