Nonstandard Conditions

Chemistry doesn't have to suck

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Inspiration

Organic Chemistry is generally considered one of the worst classes in undergrad. Like most, our first experience with OChem was in a high-pressure classroom, where the focus is on exams.

At that point, the love for learning is lost and so is curiosity.

So we asked, how can we inspire people to learn hard things?

Our goal was not to create a class helper. If we made the experience fun, people would be drawn to learn in and out of the classroom - even a middle schooler.

So what is it??

In Nonstandard Conditions you're a fake wizard (a chemist actually) and you use real organic chemistry synthesis to showcase your "magic" to the local townspeople.

Players learn by synthesizing actual chemicals through organic chemistry methods. The game provides immediate feedback, allowing players to learn from mistakes without the stress of losing points on an exam.

Most classes encourage the memorization of the entire course, none of it sticks in the long term. In Nonstandard Conditions we encourage learning the underlying mechanism and becoming familiar with the visual structure of O-Chem so you never have to question your answer.

We designed this for students in organic chemistry, people preparing to take the subject, and anyone who is simply curious about chemistry.

A cool list of how we used 5.6:

  • 3D low-poly assets from math geometry
  • Skeleton-driven animation rigs for body parts to animate independently
  • Cinematic camera movement using math interpolation (displacement/time)
  • Lighting optimized by gating shadows, bloom, and post-processing
  • Chemistry library for reagents, products, reactions, and synthesis routes
  • Chemistry particle effects built by math
  • Mathematically synthesized sound effects
  • Image generation for storyboards, icons, UI imagery, favicon, etc
  • Performance-aware codebase bloat removal
  • Used remote to prompt out-and-about
  • Full-stack testing through Codex - browser use for visual verification
  • Used 5.6 to integrate desktop and ios gameplay

Challenges we ran into

With the high Codex usage - prompts were taking 3+ hours. We would go outside and remote from our phone because there was no point working on it actively.

Organic chemistry also is very complex, so balancing scientific accuracy without information overload was a tight rope to walk on.

There were also tons of additional things we wanted to build. But for a webapp we had to keep the bloat to a minimum - and we had to tune things down or it would run too slow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we created an experience that makes organic chemistry feel approachable.

We're frankly bored of all the quiz and study platforms, we're genuinely proud of building something that teaches people through interaction rather than study content. We hope others will try inspiring people to learn outside of the classroom, not just aid those already in study.

Most importantly, the project demonstrates that the best learning begins with curiosity, experimentation, and play.

Built With

  • codex
  • gpt-5.6
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