ERA is live. After ten development blocks and roughly 17 hours of build time, the game is available at blockzerointeractive.com/games/era. This post covers what ERA is, how it was built, and one decision that made it meaningfully different from anything else in the BZI catalog.
10
Development blocks
12
Artifacts on the timeline
2
Game modes
What ERA actually is
ERA is a drag-and-drop timeline game. You place iconic computing artifacts — the abacus, the transistor, the first personal computer, generative AI — into their correct position on a historical timeline. Twelve artifacts total, covering the full arc of computing from ancient tools to the present.
There are two modes. Practice lets you work through the timeline without pressure — hints available, no clock. Arcade adds a 15-second timer per artifact. Miss the window and it counts as an error. The timer changes the experience completely: it forces pattern recognition over lookup, which is closer to what actual retention looks like.
"Placing something on a timeline is a more active operation than selecting a multiple-choice answer. The drag mechanic does educational work that a quiz format can't."
ERA is aligned with the COMP 001 curriculum at the university level — specifically the unit on the history of computing. That alignment wasn't an afterthought. The artifact selection, the timeline range, and the difficulty calibration were all built against that context from day one.
How it was built
Same stack as Keyboard Defense
Godot 4, GDScript, exported to HTML5. The same three AutoLoads from previous BZI projects — GameManager, AudioManager, ScoringManager — handle global state, sound, and scoring respectively. The infrastructure was already proven, which meant the ERA build could focus almost entirely on the game-specific systems: the drag mechanic, the timeline, and the pre-check flow.
The learning measurement system
This is the part that's new. ERA is the first BZI product to implement the Learning Gain Standard — a pre-check / post-check flow that measures improvement within a single session.
Before the main game starts, four artifacts are placed silently, without feedback. The player doesn't know they're being measured. After the full session, the score report shows two numbers: how well you did overall, and how much you improved from where you started. That delta — the learning gain — is the number that actually matters for educational use.
The pre-check runs in its own scene (precheck.tscn) so the data stays cleanly separated from the main game state. Both scores get sent to the backend as part of the same payload, along with session duration and context. The calculation happens in JavaScript, not GDScript — one place for all the math, adjacent to the data it's computing.
The printable report
The results screen generates a printable HTML report. A student can print it, sign it, and hand it in. No account required, no friction. This was a deliberate design decision: making the report free and printable removes the biggest barrier to classroom adoption. An instructor can assign ERA as homework and receive paper evidence the student completed it, without any platform dependency.
What comes next
The immediate next step for ERA is institutional. The Learning Gain Standard data — pre-check scores, post-check scores, session duration, learning gain percentage — is exactly what an instructor needs to evaluate whether a tool is working. That data is already being collected. The next phase is putting it in front of the right people.
PC Lab is also in active development. Same approach: browser-based, HTML5, built for the introductory computing curriculum. Hardware assembly and component identification, taught through interaction rather than description.
Free to play in the browser. No account required. Printable report included.
If you play it, leave a comment or send feedback to studio@blockzerointeractive.com. Which artifact surprised you? Where did the Arcade timer break you? That feedback shapes the next build.