A Game That Could Save a Life

The Brief

A classroom resource to teach kids about food allergy.

There are more than 250,000 young Australians living with severe allergies, and around 20 Australians lose their lives to anaphylaxis each year.

For young people with severe food allergy, the move from primary to secondary school can be high-risk. Food choices, social situations and personal safety become more independent, while students are increasingly expected to advocate for themselves.

The Mystery of School Island was created to help students navigate that transition, building awareness, understanding and empathy in Australian classrooms.

The challenge was to create an engaging educational game that aligned with Australian, Victorian and NSW curriculum requirements, worked across a wide range of school devices, and gave teachers a practical resource that could be easily integrated into lesson plans.

Our Approach

An educational game, that's actually fun to play.

Marketforce developed a fully custom web-based point and click adventure where players take on the role of Kid Detective, investigating a mysterious food allergy incident on School Island. The story unfolds through exploration, dialogue and clue gathering, encouraging students to actively engage with information.

We led the strategy, game design, narrative development, UX, visual design and development in-house, working closely with teachers, curriculum specialists and allergy experts to ensure the content was accurate, age-appropriate and aligned to curriculum outcomes. Specialist illustration, animation and audio partners helped bring the world of School Island to life, creating a rich, character-driven experience that balances entertainment with meaningful learning.

The game is structured around key learning themes including understanding the most common food allergens, recognising the difference between food intolerance and food allergy, identifying signs of allergic reactions and anaphylaxis, understanding why food should never be shared, developing practical food label reading skills, and building empathy and shared responsibility for keeping classmates safe.

To support these outcomes, we created a free-roaming adventure filled with unique characters, branching dialogue and interactive mini-games that reinforce learning through play. Every conversation path, interaction and player choice was carefully considered and written to ensure players could explore the story in their own way while still progressing towards key learning outcomes.

Players are free to explore School Island, meet its quirky residents, gather clues and solve problems. A dynamic hint system quietly guides players when needed, helping them stay on track without removing the satisfaction of discovery.

A Detective Notes journal acts as both a clue tracker and learning tool, allowing players to revisit information they've uncovered throughout the investigation. Players can also unlock 20 achievements with outfit rewards to customise their Kid Detective, encouraging continued exploration beyond the main story.

The game features a subtle onboarding sequence that teaches players how to interact with the world through play rather than instructions. From there, players progress through three story chapters before continuing their adventure to uncover secrets, complete achievements and explore everything School Island has to offer.

Accessibility and inclusion were key considerations throughout development. The game was designed to be playable across a wide range of devices commonly used in schools, while the cast of characters, environments and storylines were created to reflect the diversity of Australian classrooms. We wanted every student to feel welcome in the world of School Island and able to participate in the experience.

To support classroom delivery, we also created a dedicated microsite, comprehensive teacher resources, curriculum-aligned classroom activities and supporting promotional materials. The game can be played as a complete experience or broken into shorter classroom sessions, giving teachers flexibility in how they incorporate it into learning programs.

Technical Overview

A fully-custom experience, built from scratch in-house.

The Mystery of School Island is a fully bespoke game using Flutter and the Flame game engine, chosen deliberately for platform agnosticism and wide adoption. A single Dart codebase compiles to the web today as well as native iOS and Android applications in future, meaning the same game, systems and content can move to mobile devices as the resource grows, without a full rebuild. In the browser, Flutter’s rendering pipeline delivers smooth, near-native performance on low-spec school devices where typical e-learning tools struggle. Spine drives the skeletal character animation, keeping an expressive cast lightweight enough for classroom hardware.

AI-assisted development allowed a lean in-house team to design and build custom game systems at pace while retaining full creative and technical control. The result is a genuinely bespoke, future-proofed engine on a not-for-profit budget

The Results

A curriculum-aligned learning experience.

The Mystery of School Island is a unique educational resource that balances meaningful learning with a genuinely enjoyable gameplay experience. It was launched in June 2026, providing Australian schools with a curriculum-aligned digital learning experience.

By the numbers:

644 Image assets

31,087 Lines of code

126 Animation cycles

549 Dialogue nodes

11 Curriculum links

Play The Mystery of School Island:
game.allergy250kteens.org.au