Language City was an online gaming platform designed to allow students studying English to experience a virtual version of a foreign city through an episodic narrative driven game. LC comprised a browser-based immersive 3D game-engine and toolset, allowing a small content team to rapidly produce quest based learning experiences.
Language City was an enormously ambitious platform that integrated a vast array of functionality and allowing a huge degree of flexibility. It's main purpose was to allow for the creation of new virtual locations and characters to converse with. The platform also included facilities for mini-games, task selection, progress-tracking, measurement and analytics, multi-characterset localisation and more. We were also experimenting with speech recognition systems with some success.
I developed the underlying technical strategy for the entire platform including application structure, data models and features to support modular growth. Later, the Technical Director stepped down and I assumed full technical leadership for the product.
Language City successfully reached closed beta in summer 2012, receiving a great deal of positive feedback. Over the following months I worked with the leadership team to define a more streamlined and focused experience for our 1.0 release. Despite several interested investors and a lot of internal confidence in our direction, the anticipated cost of finalising development lead to it being cancelled in Autumn 2012.