discussion / Software and Mobile Apps  / 23 June 2017

Operation Ferdinand - a Predator and Livestock Conflict Prevention Video Game!

Hello there, WiILDLABS!

My name is Gabriela Fleury, a conservation biologist and graduate of the University of Cape Town's ConBio programme. I work with Jaymie Krambeck, a software engineer, to create environmental education video games under our newly founded Bright Frog Game Studios.

Our mission is to create environmental education games to address the most pressing issues that weigh upon our world, from human and wildlife conflict and beyond. 

Our first major project is Operation Ferdinand. Operation Ferdinand is a unique predator and livestock conflict prevention effort that is a novel blending of ecological education and video game design. 

The main effort of Operation Ferdinand is a free multi-use downloadable video game for Windows and OS X that will teach best practices for livestock enclosure construction and predator identification (as well as an anti-poisoning message in version 4.0.)

Suitable for use in field conditions as it contains only simple graphics, this free game will be an invaluable outreach and educational tool for local communities.

We're excited to share this project with you and to become a part of the WILDLABS community!




Hi there!

We're not quite at the stage to release in the Apple Store yet, but a hack to open the programme on a Mac is to right-click the installer file and select Open, this should trigger an extra option in the security warning to install it anyways. You only have to do this once, the system should remember the installer for any future installs (new major versions may reset this).

Let me know if this works! I had to do the same thing for QGIS on my Mac, Apple's pretty stringent on software developers not associated with them.

Gabriela

Thanks for all the interest everyone! My colleague Jaymie and I are so excited that people are checking out our game. Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!