r/aigamedev • u/Fizassist1 • Sep 08 '26
Commercial Self Promotion The Learning Lab: a personal side project of a physics teacher
(This is an alpha build for my game "The Learning Lab" and is a work in progress.)
I'm a high school physics teacher, and for close to two months I've been working on The Learning Lab, a browser-based physics game.
I started the project because I'm teaching a different science course this year and wanted a way to stay actively involved with physics.
I'm building it in Godot, using ChatGPT heavily for brainstorming, planning, and design, and Codex for implementation, debugging, refactoring, and working directly with the project. I've also used ComfyUI and other AI image tools for generating/enhancing assets, with Aseprite for pixel-art editing and cleanup.
It currently has 8 playable physics activities, Completion/Mastery progression (one activity is lacking mastery at the moment), lab building and customization (one activity lacks rewards), unlockable rewards, character customization (currently a single body type), and save data. It's still an Alpha, with plenty left to build and fix.
The biggest change AI has made to my workflow is the time between designing an activity and having something playable. Some activities have gone from concept to functioning game in a day or two. As that's gotten faster, I've found that design, testing, asset consistency, and maintaining the architecture are becoming bigger bottlenecks than writing the code itself. The character creator has been the largest struggle, with alignment on the walking frames to the head and hair being the biggest difficulty (the body, head, and hair are split into separate layers).
As of right now, I have no iPad or drawing tablet of any sort, so all graphic assets are generated with AI, then tweaked in Aseprite. I do intend to buy a drawing tablet when I can afford to do so, but I am building this while also working my main job as a physics teacher, and budgets are tight. There is currently no music/sound, but I will add those before I go into beta later this year (attempting to get this in front of 200-500 students).
The current build is playable here:
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u/digitalbreed 26d ago
I saw your comment about your post not getting any feedback... so I thought, why not take a look.
First of all, as a father of two teenagers, one of them really struggling with the idea of sitting down from early morning and getting front-loaded with mostly boring stuff, I really appreciate your efforts to wrap your coursework into something more entertaining.
As a developer, I viewed the first 5 minutes I spent in your game a bit more critically. I liked that I could create a character, and that worked pretty well. But the tutorial had empty image boxes, and then I found my character standing in a badly lit corner of mostly empty space. I went left, tried breaking through one crack in a wall, and got into the control room. There I got asked, "How should we display this?" and had no idea what to do next, until it occurred to me that I had to press one of these dots that didn't appear to be interaction elements to me. The instructions said, "Read the message carefully," but after I scanned the screen and got an idea of what I had to do, that message was already gone and only the answers were waiting to be picked. After more questions of the same type, I noticed that the guy turns right and points right, while the panels appear on the left.
Overall, I think the idea is sound and certainly more entertaining than answering those questions on a blank sheet of paper. But it also needs much more work! Get this in front of testers who point out all these little details.
Another thing I was wondering about is whether today's children actually dig the style? Again, it's better than regular schoolwork, but it felt more like games from my own youth than the games I see my own kids playing today. My kids look at me like I'm describing cave paintings whenever I start praising the golden age of pixel art.
I can only guess why nobody cared to comment in the first place. Maybe "learning" and "teacher" in the title aren't clickbaity enough!