Climate Crisis
April 2022
C#, Unity, GameJam
Another game jam! This time the Ludum Dare 50. After our last game (Warp Driver) we were feeling ambitious. We felt as though we had done well last time because the scope was well contained. A lot of our time was spent creating levels which doesn't have the greatest impact on place experience throughout the game.
The theme was announced to be Delay the inevitable. Again Ludum Dare is a 72-hour game jam, but we were limited to 48 hours on the weekend. We were inspired to create a game around climate change and weather eventually destroying the earth.
The idea was to place down different buildings or utilities to delay the inevitable end of the world. This would be made more difficult be weather events that would destroy buildings. The player would have to balance the short term gain of using fossil fuels for the long term cost of pollution.
In the end the game ended up with 3 different bars for how well the player was doing.
- Pollution
- Population
- Energy
Pollution is produced by buildings such as the coal power plant, oil rig and the mines. Pollution is removed by planting trees.
Population is a sort of health bar. It cannot be increased and is only diminished by events that harm people.
Energy is consumed by all buildings that do not produce energy. If there is not enough supply to meet demand none of the energy requiring buildings will function.
Periodically during the game random events would happen. These would be along the lines of natural disasters caused by pollution being too high, crimes because lack of police stations or natural disasters. The impact of these events can be curbed by having the correct type of emergency response buildings. The more total buildings there are the higher the requirement of emergency responders.
This game was fun to make and looks impressive but lacks solid gameplay challenge. After playing the game once or twice, it is quite easy to come up with a strategy to do well. We spent a lot of time balancing the different buildings.
We wanted to implement visual weather effects but did not have time.
In retrospect we probably were over ambitious, but it was still a very interesting project and I like the final outcome.