Splitting the team

Since this is a client project, and none of us knew what the client’s expectations were, I had proposed the idea of splitting the group into 4, with each team having 2 team members.

The idea was to pitch multiple different ideas, and see which ones resonate with our client more, so we have a better understanding of what kind of game the client is expecting.

Team 1 — A detective game with time travel elements.

Team 2 (which I was a part of) — RTS style game with a phone dialling mechanic.

Team 3 — Expanding and defending an island against common natural disasters

Team 4 — A lighthouse game resembling mechanics from ‘5 nights at Freddies’

Unfortunately, team 4 wasn’t able to present on that day, but the client had seen the first 3 pitches, and liked something about each of them.

Final iteration of the design

If you wish you can find out all about the iteration process here, but for the purposes of the blog, here’s the final iteration:

The map is divided into cities​, each city produces a certain amount of mount of resources at a certain rate. Whenever the city has an event, the city stops producing those resources until the conflict is resolved.

To resolve the conflict, the user must click on it, and dial either 999 or 101 depending on if the event is an emergency or non-emergency. 

If the event is an emergency, the user must spend a certain amount of the earned resources to resolve the conflict. If the conflict is a non-emergency, the user must play a mini game to resolve the conflict.

After resolving any conflict, these also earns resilience points, which can be used by students to compare with each other. 

The focus of these RTS mechanics was primarily to teach children resilience through resource management mechanics, to save the present for the future.

After my meeting with a phd game design student at Falmouth University, I followed up on some of the references mentioned, mainly sesame street games. At the time, I was also hooked to playing club penguin out of sheer nostalgia.

Something I noticed is that both those games used similar point and click frameworks, and built on top of that so there was re-usablity of code, simplifying the entire process of coding more games. Sesame Street also provided me a perspective on making games with an educational lens.

After proposing these to the team, we came up with more mini game designs:

1. NHS — Teach kids on how to use the first aid kit with drag and drop mechanics
2. Police — Aims to teach kids to be aware of suspicious vehicles and police road duties with driving mechanics.
3. Mountain Rescue — Aims to teach kids the dangers of mountain climbing and mountain rescue operations, using mechanics similar to the fishing game in club penguin
4. Firefighting — Aims to teach kids about the different kinds of fire extinguishers using drag and drop mechanics
5. Coast Guard — Aims to teach kids the difference between high and low tides and how to prepare for it, using warning mechanics and a mechanic where the player throws  life preservers.

The Map

Our artist, Denae, had pulled this incredibly accurate 3D model of Cornwall, which ended up being really helpful, but at the time, visually it didn’t look interesting enough for a children’s game, since it look to similar to a google maps satellite image of Cornwall.

To make things look interesting, I decided to pass the texture of the map through a GIMP filter (since I don’t have Photoshop), that makes everything a little pixelated and shifted, providing a painterly look to the map of Cornwall.

The waves

While I was visiting the Falmouth Art Gallery in the library, I came across this beautiful moving sculpture of waves, and was wondering if I could implement the same in the game as well.

This was pretty simple stuff: an instance of a cube with 2 rotation keyframes, replicated in a grid with some timing offset.

To save on performance, this was recorded from the top, and used as a texture in Unity.

Some other models

I also contributed some other 3D models to contribute to the look and feel of the RTS scene, and to provide assets for the NHS scene:

Game Logo

I was talking to a close friend in Graphic Design when she told me about the Chough, and how after 50 years, they were finally returning back to Cornwall, and I thought about how this fits in so perfectly with the idea of resilience.

Upon researching I found out that the chough was everywhere in the UK. So many emblems and badges use the chough.

I asked if she could make me rough sketches of a logo since as a graphic designer, she would be more experienced with the composition rules and Gestalt principles of making a logo, so she provided me with these:

The team loved them, and after asking Denae to flesh it out, we finally got our logo