Comments
After a devastating wildfire, it is up to you to restore the ecosystem and turn back the hands of time?
You have fight against the clock to rewild the land, fortunately you have your trusty tools and a mysterious power to slow down time.
Project Information:
his game is a submission to the 2021 Diverse Game Developers Jam by: "Team ReWild".
📝 Table of Contents
🧐 Diverse Game Developers Jam
The Game Jam was held by the IGDA Foundation and the Grant for the Web. The premise of the Jam was that starting on July 26th 2021 and ending on August 19th. The premise of the jam was to bring their communities together to see diverse developers create exciting experiences and stories, and explore alternative monetization strategies in video games.
The game jam was open globally to underrepresented developers that create web based games exploring alternative monetization within video games and implementing Web Monetization API. We want to encourage all developers of any background to participate. Teams and Individuals all are welcome.
Following were the Rules for the Jam:
You must create an original game for the game jam and you must develop it during the duration of the event.
You are allowed to submit the game to multiple game jams as long as the game was developed during the period of this event.
You are free to use any game engine or framework when creating the game.
Teams can include up to 6 members.
All games must be uploaded and submitted by August 19th, 2021 by 23:59 UTC. Please ensure you give yourself enough time to do so. No exceptions or extensions will be given.
A game executable and several screenshots must be supplied. Entries will be invalid without these items.
Updates can be made to entries so long as they do not add to the game or change content. They must only be to fix bugs.
Individual or independent game developers must identify as a person from an underrepresented background– which may include but is not limited to LGBTQIA+, people of color, people with accessibility needs, marginalized genders, veterans, neurodiversity, or others. Alternatively, teams that participate must have at least 75% members from underrepresented communities.
You must integrate and use Web Monetization in the game – At the end of the day, the IGDA Foundation and Grant for the Web are interested in playful innovation around the idea of monetization, specifically in the context of web monetization protocols.
Team ReWild consists of a handful of ragtag scholars from the IGDA Foundation's Diverse Game Developers Virtual Exchange. The individual members are:
Felipe Larrocha, Producer & 2D-Artist.
Callum Moscovitch, 2D-artist.
Aslı Karayel, Composer & Audio Designer.
Mido Kalash, Producer & Game Designer.
Ahmed Hamad, Gameplay Programmer.
Kenneth E. Norris, Gameplay Programmer.
💡 Our Game & Goal
Our goal as a team was to develop a transformative Serious Game. After the player has played our game our goal is to try and affect their behaviour. Our end goal is to change their feelings towards society and that they would take active steps towards bettering it from an ecofriendly point of view. This would be achieved by changing their perspective of themselves and their relation to others should towards being more humble and ecofriendly towards their environment.
The player is not expected to pick up any new knowledge or real world applicable skills while they are playing our game as we do not aim to educate about reforestation or any other form of nature preservation. Our goal is to let them explore nature preservation as a concept in a simple and familiar environment, to motivate them to seek their own way in their own individual situations to see what they can do to help the cause.
The main character in this game find themselves visiting their childhood home after a wild forestfire managed to destroy all of the local flora & fauna. There they find their grandmother's old diaries containing key information about forest preservation and care.
They also find out that a not so local corporation is trying to bid for the land in order to privatise it and build a tourist resort. The main character therefore decides to take onto themselves to Reforest the land and make a claim for it's ecological value.
They are given 2 years to do so, if they fail the land will be sold to the corporation.
⛓️ Our Difficulties & Limitations
Albeit our team being consisted of a ragtag of quite talented and extremely motivated new talent in the industry.
There where some threats and weaknesses in the team that lead to us achieving only a demo of our initial scope. These difficulties that we overcame are:
Our team having no prior experience working together. Most of us new each other by first name basis but were introduced to each other only a handful of days prior to joining the GameJam.
Our team having little to no experience working in a GameJam environment. The majority of the team members had no experience participating in a GameJam, therefore the working environment and pace was something new to pick up.
Size of scope. Building a game is no easy task, building a serious game abour reforestation is hard, doing it with less than a handful of weeks is even harder. Defining our scope and realising what we were capable to do was a key aspect of our work.
Therefore we decided together as a team to limit our scope and use this opportunity as a test for our idea and build a demo first with the only the core elements that we could build in time that distill our vision into one small sample.
💡 Idea / Solution
Our solution to deal with the previously mentioned difficulties was to simply treat this jam as a test for a demo. All of the tools and the idea itself is therefore prone to changes depending on the feedback received as we use this possibility as an opportunity to learn how to work together, jam together and get better at our individual professions.
Our solution to incorporate the Web Monetisation model would be to make it a core aspect of our gameplay, by letting the player toggle between a "slow" premium version where time in game goes by a tad slower and they are allowed to make more mistakes. This way the player get's to decide whether they want to actually enjoy their experience at it's fullest and partake in the product, or if they want to enjoy a lesser although free version.
A core aspect of our solution as we've designed this game mostly outside of entertaniment purposes would be that the amount of money spent by the player would be, to some extent donated to an organisation working towards nature presarvation.
Using a similiar model tools such as Ecosia are using today.
🚀 Future Scope
The future scope of the project would be to distill all the feedback we've gathered from the Jam and implement them in our core design.
If the team decides to continue with the development of the game then pre-production would begin and the game would begin development.
⛏️ Built With
FL Studio 20 - Composition
FMOD - SFX
Figma - Design Workshops
GitHub - Version Control
Unity - Game Engine
The Adobe Products - Art
✍️ Authors
@MoK-Kalash - The producer tasked with writing this.
See also the list of contributors who participated in the team!
🎉 Acknowledgments
Potatoes in all shapes & forms.
Each and everyone one in the Team.
The IGDA Foundation that gave us all of these opportunities and Cheered us along especially:
Steven Taarland, from the IGDA-F.
Brie Wendt, from the IGDA-F.
Nika Nour, from the IGDA-F.
Sarah Spiers, from the IGDA-F.
Last not least we would like to thank:
The Grant for the Web.
Sandra "Maxi" Molina for suggesting to us that we should add voice lines in the game.
Aslı's mom for providing the voicelines.
