We Are Planet Earth
This game was a collaborative three-man effort created for the 2023 UW-Madison Respawn Game Jam. This project was developed in Unity using C#. The game’s concept, development, design, and submission had a one-week deadline. Our game begins with the Earth itself knowing that the humans are polluting the planet. The player, in the role of the Earth, must stop this destruction by using natural disasters to convert people to environmental activism or, unfortunately, simply by destroying the offending humans.
Programming
This game features many independent agents that represent groups of people and traverse the world using several different modes of transportation. Constraining the movement within the world map’s land masses required some ingenuity. Our team split the map into several different layers to demarcate where the groups of people could travel and where certain natural disasters could occur. Because of the many different groups of people moving through the world, performance sensitive programming was necessary to ensure the game ran smoothly.
Custom GUI was used quite a bit to make the interaction fun and enticing. We chose to keep the game simple, and purposely used only the mouse for control. Given the simplicity, we made sure that the GUI was used to help the game feel dynamic and interesting. Working with other programmers, dividing tasks and collaborating to solve problems was a great experience. We were able to meet all our deadlines and submitted a fully playable and technically impressive project.
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Art Direction
As for the art direction on this project, we went with a cartoonish looking map and flat colors, as realism was not our goal. We didn’t want to overload the player with information from a photorealistic map considering hundreds of individual data points. With the focus on simplicity, we wanted to capture a style reminiscent of a strategic ‘government’ type map, with only relevant information being displayed.
