AnimalAlbum - Play With Animals

Sjors Jansen, who has formerly worked on Deus Ex 3 and the last couple of Tomb Raider games has started his own company to develop an educational type of game, name AnimalAlbum

So with that I'd like to introduce you to AnimalAlbum, which provides this:

• Adventure game, as in talking, actively thinking about connections between characters.
• JRPG in general look and feel, exploring a world, searching for animals.
• Different sort of battles/encounters. It's about what you know. Encounters are not mandatory.
• Real animals, real data, real knowledge.
• Jump in, jump out co-op play. One player is the leader (child), other is the follower (mum or dad for example).

He is trying to achieve the following with his game:

What I'm actually trying to achieve is getting people to take more interest in the creatures of the world we're living in. You can see the game as a Pokemon of sorts with real animals.
Part of the motivation behind it ties back to a letter printed in science magazine by a group of conservationists who were basically surprised to find that kids knew more Pokemon than actual real animals, calling out to the community to take heed of that.

I haven't really seen much come out of that except a "print yourself" trading card game, and I can't expect the game industry to jump on this since you'd automatically be dealing with the "educational game" stigma. But I feel it's something that needs to be done. So I'm creating this really laid back game that mostly tries to be kind and lets you do your thing. I mean, how many kind games do you know besides earthbound?
I'm hoping the idea will start brewing in the minds of the general public, because videogames still need to show that they can be useful on a large scale. And AnimalAlbum could potentially grow into a series that would ideally cover all of the animals on this blue ball of ours. So I'm hoping for your support.

The game has an estimated release date of early 2015 and is scheduled to be released on PC at a retial price of $12. You can find more information on his website.

I don't think I'll be following this actively, but thought I mention it here as it has some RPG elements and the guy is Dutch :)