Halfway Across: A Time-Traveling Ocean Adventure to Teach the Impact of Marine Plastics

This blog post was written by Linda Zheng, a 2025 Marine Plastics Ambassador.

Halfway Across is an education game targeted towards students designed to raise awareness on marine plastics. It emphasizes both the history and wonders of our ocean to create more nuance around contemporary environmental issues as a result of human action. The storyline follows a time wrap that causes plastics within the Great Pacific Patch to be cast back into our prehistoric ocean, beginning with the Cambrian Ages. Players must find a way to restore the ocean through exploration and puzzles before the future changes irrevocably. It aims to have students develop a deeper care for the ocean and learn the consequences of marine plastics.

The original characters that Linda created reveals the impact of our modern world on an ancient, pristine ocean.

The game was mainly developed through Unity, which is a game engine that allowed me to have greater flexibility with game elements and design choices. Throughout the process I also engaged in research on marine species throughout the geological timescale, hoping to create a game that had an accurate representation of the fascinating evolutions that took place in our ocean. As the game is currently still in development, I am adjusting the gameplay to fit into a lesson plan that teachers could easily access. I have reached out to several teachers on LinkedIn based in the New York City area who have shown interest in incorporating games into education. I am hoping to collaborate with them for the upcoming school year to have Halfway Across reach classrooms.

Once launched the game will engage high school students.

While the game is still in development, I am hoping in the upcoming school year to have Halfway Across reach at least 4 separate classes with 20 students each. In addition, I want to engage more teachers as well to gauge the effectiveness of the game and adjust to fit the needs of teaching.

The project was definitely challenging and had its learning curves. There were several times where I had to adjust how I chose to develop the game after considering my own vision for the designs and the overall gameplay complexity. Unity, although is a powerful game development tool and fit my needs for the project, was hard to grasp because of its multitude of capacities. It was a fulfilling experience learning Unity, however, as it expands my own understanding of game development. In addition, I really loved reimagining all the prehistoric marine animals in the context of my game. This made the design part of the game a smooth experience and I really enjoyed all the creativity and freedom I had in making the backgrounds and characters.