Osiris

I've been asked a few times for a copy of Expedition: Osiris, an educational computer game I worked on while in college. Unfortunately some of the images of Egyptian artifacts that are in the game are copyrighted by the university, so the game cannot be distributed publicly. But, I did get permission to create a "public domain" version of the game, as long as all the artifact images were obscured. Today I finally got around to doing it. Here are download links: (they are about 17 MB each)

The system requirements are pretty modest: a 1 GHz processor and a 32 MB video card should play the game just fine.

Here is a medium quality WMV video of me playing the game for a few minutes: Osiris Video. It's a big file but it should stream OK. Here's a low-quality YouTube copy:

The purpose of the game is to teach the basics of a freshman 'Archaeology 101' class. You play the role of a college professor who organizes an Egyptian dig and are supposed to learn how to do the following things:

  1. Acquire funding
  2. Create a team of graduate students, specialists and local workers
  3. Manage the digging process to maximize efficiency and minimize artifact breakage
  4. Fend off attacks from mummies, crocodiles, scorpions, thieves and evil genies
  5. Manage team morale and energy while keeping within the budget
  6. Interpret your findings
  7. Publish your results in respectable journals to increase your prestige

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Osiris 1

Setting up the team

Osiris 2

Managing the dig

Posted on June 17, 2006
Comments (6) Trackbacks (1)
  1. Boo, it won’t open with Rosetta! :o( I really wanted to try this too. I can rebuild it as a universal app if you want, let me know.

  2. I tried it on my G4 and it didn’t work there either – oops :P. It looks like when I re-zipped the file with the updated images, the execute permission bit was lost on the binary (stupid WinZip).
    I uploaded a new Mac version – try it out and let me know how it works in Rosetta (I heard that OpenGL apps sometimes don’t work at all?).
    I’d rebuild it as a universal binary myself, but unfortunately it is not built using XCode :(, so it would probably take a lot of work to get autoconf and automake to create a universal binary. If the updated version doesn’t work in Rosetta, we can try it.

  3. Cool, this version works fine, and runs very quickly/smoothly too!

  4. That’s really impressive!

  5. Wow it sounded so professional and real world until the mummies and genie attack part haha. I can’t wait to play it.

  6. it was hilariously fun!!!!!

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