Radication Games is a student-based game development team. The team consists of sub-teams corresponding to programming, art, game design and audio, relative to what might be expected in a game development studio. All students within the team are in their 3rd year of their respective university programmes. The creation of the team came about as one of the modules in 3rd year is to work within a group project across two semesters.
Radication Games has created a game called Sanitarium in which players battle tuberculosis, managing individual patients and limited resources on a world map. It uses mathematical models developed by the University of St Andrews, powered by Microsoft mobile and cloud technology so players can receive real-time updates on the virtual patients they are treating.
Engagement with the public and educating communities in which clinical trials are performed is an essential part of tuberculosis drug development. Sanitarium is a “fun game with a serious purpose” and has grown out of a collaboration between the University of St Andrews, Abertay University (Dundee) and Microsoft. The UStAN team provided the brief to a group of 3rd year students to create a game that could teach people about tuberculosis, and how to treat it in the real world. It should incorporate all the latest modelling data in the game and Sanitarium incorporates our pulmonary flux model first iteration. Thus, the patients that are “treated” in the game depend on the working of the model to predict the outcome. This model takes into account the pathology of tuberculosis and the impact of different cell types on growth rate and susceptibility.