Platform: PC and Mobile

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Engine: Unity

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Genre: Farming Sim, Geolocation AR game, Serious Game

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Team: 1 Engineer and Designer (me), 1 Data Scientist and UI artist, 1 team lead and design lead, 1 3d artist

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I volunteered with a group of concerned activists I met online to create a prototype for this environmental activism game. We later found a group within the IGDA and pitched to them for funding, creating the prototype seen here. The idea of the game was that environmental activist organizers could sign up on an external website and register their event geolocation in the game. Then, activists who showed up in person to help with the environmental volunteering event would receive ingame rewards for attending. The game itself was a solarpunk-themed farming sim, and the main means of player progression was the rare species of seeds they would earn from doing one-time environmental volunteer actions in real life. We also created a way to share your garden for other players to view, eschewing the common grid-based approach of many farming games to enable more artistic and creative gardens for players.

DESIGN TASKS:

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Internal Pitching and Mockups

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I worked to coordinate design efforts from the entire team, and leverage their individual capabilities. We defined our goals early on and were able to iterate quickly with mockups and small prototypes of ideas, of which I completed several while working with the team. I contributed some of my design ideas to what would appear in the final pitch and prototype, but more importantly, I was able to reconcile diverging design goals and ideas from different people on the team into something coherent.

ENGINEERING TASKS:

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Gameplay Systems Programming and Loading Dynamic Server Content

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I used my existing experience with live service architectures in Unity to create a prototype that would load geolocations and ingame event metadata into the game. We also scraped websites like the Environmental Voter Scorecard and dynamically pulled live information into the game for easy visualization and use in gameplay.

QA

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We worked down to the wire to make sure that our gameplay experience was as ready for pitch time as possible. I was the sole QA specialist and maintainer of the game code, and I was working with the team to find and fix bugs at a rapid pace into the final hours. I was proud of myself for how well I handled this situation under pressure- I have never worked this fast before!

OTHER TASKS:

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Pitch Deck and Pitch Session

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I presented the pitch material along with our vision holder and team leader to a closed meeting with publishers who went on to play our prototype. She, the data scientist, and I also created the pitch deck together.