University Utrecht Game about Sustainability
Group project - February 2024 until April 2024Play the final product hereFor this project our group got tasked to make a game about sustainability. The project was in collaboration with University Utrecht and every team got one UU student team member who knows more about sustainability. Explained to us was to make a good game that lets the player think about the subject instead of force feeding an opinion or solution to the player coined as “Chocolate covered broccoli””.
We were in the concepting fase for a long time, it was hard to find something everyone was content with. Our final product Bureaucratic Hell is a game about a future Utrecht where everyone has fled to secret underground tunnels to escape the bad situation on the surface. In the game you get to choose policies about the tunnels and reflect on those choices with the bureaucrats hiding in the tunnels.
Although the game is visually and stylistic very nice, the gameplay is lacking because last minute changes which didn’t take in account of the puzzle system made for dialogs with on top of that some bugs. This made the game frustrating to play.
I really like the concept that was presented to us and would love to try again with the idea to see if I can make a game with the impact envisioned.
In this video you can see how the player makes a policy choice and than sees the effect it has on the tunnels.
For our game, we wanted to add extra interaction beyond choosing policies, because this could enhance the world and make the gameplay more interesting. Every time you talk to an NPC, the player must solve a puzzle. The puzzles work as follows:
You have a number of nodes that vary per level. All nodes must be connected to each other to solve the puzzle. Each node in a level follows a set of rules:
- Reach: Each node has a maximum distance over which it can be connected to others. This varies per node in a puzzle.
- Connected: Once a node is connected, it cannot be connected again.
- Start: Each level has a start node where you always begin the level, and from there you must connect further.
The puzzles have a few problems. The biggest problem was that there was hidden information of the reach of the nodes. This resulted in the players brute forcing the puzzles. Besides that where more communication mistakes. The nodes get random colours and symbols, those don‘t mean anything but confused the players.