ATS: School Life

You are Obaid Hamad, a new student at ATS — a large modern school in Ajman, UAE. One school day is the whole game.

Walk the campus, sit in classes, befriend the students you meet, play basketball on the courtyard court, and finish the day with a reputation you earned. The school is open and walkable, every room can be entered, and everybody in it has somewhere to be.

The day

07:00 to 15:00. Finish a job and the clock moves on — and the whole school moves with it, because every student, teacher and member of staff is following their own timetable.

• Win — reach the 15:00 bell with your reputation intact.
• Lose — reputation hits zero. A fight, a skipped class, or being caught where you should not be, and the day ends early in the principal's office.

What there is to do

• Explore — walk, run, talk, sit, use the computers, pick things up.
• Missions — 36 of them, handed out by students and teachers.
• Basketball — 1v1 on the blue court, with dribble, shoot, pass and steal.
• Friendship — Stranger → Acquaintance → Friend → Best Friend, and Rival the other way. Friends will follow you; rivals will want a word.
• Schoolyard fights — optional, arcade, and entirely non-graphic. Punch, kick, block, dodge. Nobody bleeds; the loser is just stunned. It still costs you reputation, because the school is watching.

The school

Two floors and twenty-eight rooms: classrooms, a computer lab, science, chemistry and physics labs, a programming and networking lab, the library, the cafeteria, the teachers' room, the principal's office, both corridors, the courtyard, the basketball court, the football pitch, and the bus bay.

Controls

Built for an iPad, touch only: a large joystick bottom-left, and six big buttons bottom-right. Swipe to turn the camera, pinch to zoom.

Built with

A stylized modern 3D school in cobalt blue and school grey, tuned to run on a tablet with Low, Medium and High graphics settings. Progress saves locally, so the day is waiting where you left it.

Status

First playable. The campus, the students and staff, the screens, the game systems and the sound are all in. Still to come: real generated models for the bus and the palms, more ambience and footstep audio, and a pass on every visual against the reference art.