Jason Jamerson
Axolotl Haven is a pet owner training app developed in partnership
with LSU AGGRC.
A free browser game about keeping one animal alive.
Axolotl Haven teaches axolotl care without stopping the game: every fact arrives as narration, spoken over live play. A player collects a glowing story bubble, the narrator starts, and the swimming continues. The next bubble appears when she finishes. Three chapters carry one animal from a canal in Mexico City to a rescue tank to a living room, and each chapter ends with a checkpoint quiz drawn word for word from what the player just heard.
Three worlds, each drawn entirely in code on a single canvas with no image files loaded. The environments carry the teaching. A canal under pressure, a tank under care, and a home aquarium set up correctly.
A canal in Xochimilco, the only place axolotls still live wild. What the species is, why it is critically endangered, and what invasive tilapia and canal trash do to a population.
A recovery tank under monitoring. The player feeds the animal correctly and refuses the wrong food, and learns why feeder goldfish and processed food cause harm.
A home aquarium. Tank size, water temperature, substrate risk, daily waste removal, and why an axolotl should never be handled.
Fifteen minutes from the title screen to a certificate, on a phone or a desktop, with no installation and no account.
The game states the partnership on its title screen and on the certificate a player earns.
The LSU Aquatic Germplasm and Genetic Resources Center preserves the cells of aquatic species so populations can be recovered. The axolotl is a case where that work is urgent.
It is also an animal thousands of people keep as a pet, often bought before it is understood.
A player learns why the species is endangered in the wild, then learns how to keep one alive at home. Both halves of the problem sit in one fifteen-minute experience.
The XR Studio builds the interactive systems. The AGGRC supplies the science.
Three directions that build on what is already built.