The Island. project 02
It's a game about reproduction.The player-controlled island is constantly drifting in the ocean.Select the right species and introduce them to the island.As the game progresses, the composition of species on the island becomes more complex.Beware, one poor choice could lead to the extinction of an entire species.So, are you ready?Let's improve the diversity of species on the island by adjusting the weather and species composition.
Project description: From July 12 to July 14, the project participated in a GameJam competition with the theme of biodiversity in Haidian District, Beijing. I teamed up with two students in our university. One of them was responsible for the program, while the other dealt with art (model and rendering). I took the task of numerical design and some work of the program. The game mechanism was a result of the discussion among all teammates.
Development process: After knowing the theme, we discussed to determine a clear development direction. First, we brainstormed to expand our design thinking. The theme reminded us of the concept mentioned in biology class: ecosystem, so we came up with an idea that building a complete ecosystem can effectively reflect the theme of "biodiversity". The problem is how to make a stable ecosystem change to reflect biological diversity. We thought of the common synthetic systems in role-playing games, so we can put several stable ecosystems in the scene, and require players to fuse them one by one. After the fusion of biological groups, some animals will become extinct, and players should ensure that there are as many organisms in the final synthetic ecosystem as possible. Based on the idea, we decided to use isolated islands at sea to represent relatively closed and stable ecosystems, from which the project was named: The Island. However, for an ecosystem, there are not only animals as consumers, but also producers and decomposers who will impact the balance. By analogy with the function cards that often appear in Simulation Games, we introduce the weather as a Buff. Every once in a while, players can adjust the climate of the island, thus affecting the reproduction of biological groups. After determining the direction, we started the formal development. During the development, we found that such a design will lead to a lack of connection between each level and the player cannot obtain enough sense of achievement; And it's hard to make many levels in two days. So we decided to change the mechanism to a continuous one. The player will get an island lacking creatures at the beginning. Then he/she needs to select one of the three randomly generated islands for fusing every round and gets an opportunity to adjust the weather every five rounds. After 20 rounds, the game ends. The final score = number of species * 100 + number of creatures. The visualized scores can motivate players to continue challenging. In the follow-up game-play exchange meeting, our view was confirmed. Most players were willing to try this game repeatedly to earn higher scores.
All members of our group participated in Game Jam for the first time. The biggest problem for us was the time arrangement, and we often worried about our ability to complete the project on time. Fortunately, at the beginning of the competition, we quickly determined the development direction without wasting too much time on topic selection, and the division of labor was clear-cut. Although in normal times, parallel developments are rare (since the games are developed by a single person), we have managed to cope with this situation well with the PlasticSCM incorporated in Unity, and had no major conflict in program development. I was responsible for the numerical and algorithmic aspects in the development process. Simulating an ecosystem requires quite complex mathematical models. During the development, the biggest problem I faced was: if an all-round simulation was carried out, the game would be like a complex mathematical question, where players needed to constantly apply formulas to find the optimal solution, which was not interesting enough to attract them to try again. Therefore, in addition to using the mathematical model to complete the basic algorithm, I added random numbers to make the game results less controllable, thus making game playing more enjoyable.