A game to save the planet?

Finally Nico and I managed this time to propose a finished game in a Game Jam! Our first try was for the Global Game Jam of 2020 and Nico had done an extraordinary job of creating graphical assets while, on my side, I had pitifully tried to integrate everything and despite that the gameplay was affected : I had not been up to the task. Which is finally one of the reasons to jam, to push yourself to the maximum and to grow each time!

And this time I didn't let myself be fooled, and we managed to come up with a successful version of our "2050 Complexity".

So for the little story, as the subject is about renewable energies, we have the chance in France to have a specialist of the question, Mr Jancovici who, with a famous cartoonist, Blain, have co-written a graphic novel. I'm putting a link here (Le Monde sans fin) because frankly if you want a funny comic book to read and above all very instructive, do yourself a favor, buy it or give it to your friends and family for Christmas, they will love it!  And know that the carbon impact of this one is quite heavy for a book, 3 to 4 kg of CO2 according to Jancovici, but above all, by all that you will learn, you will make much greater savings of CO2 for the planet and it will already be a step towards our redemption!

Come on, back to the point. There is an equation, called Kaya's identity. Yoichi Kaya is an economist who equated the emission of greenhouse gases. And it's this equation that is in the game engine. So there is a lack of feedback for every choice you make, we are aware of that and if this game ever meets its audience then we will manage to update it, a bit like Reigns by visualizing the parameters as gauges.

F    =    Pop    *    G / Pop    *    E / G    *    F / E

So know that each time you make a choice in the game, a modification of each parameter is integrated, and the game uses this to make the graphical state of the planet evolve as well as to evaluate the performance at the end.

And finally I'd like to say that for this game jam  we went for a game like Reigns which itself took as a reference the Tinder application. It made sense because there is something stupid and dizzying to decide the future of the earth in a few clicks, right or left, to arrive very quickly in 2050 and see the damage. The more stupid it is, the more fun it is, and what better tone than black humor to tackle such a depressing subject that urgently needs our attention?

So as it is a Postmortem, I have to answer those questions:

What went as I wished? 

- The implementation of the Kaya equation as a game mechanic was finally very easy and I am very happy with the result.

- We created a game that is as close as possible to Hartmut Koenitz’s definition of IDN : “narrative expression in various forms, implemented as a multimodal computational system with optional analog elements and experienced through a participatory process in which interactors have a non-trivial influence on progress, perspective, content, and/or outcome” (Koenitz upcoming 2023).

What didn't turn out the way I wanted it to? The visual feedback of this same equation is not clear for the player. He doesn't always understand if he did the right thing or if he made the situation worse by his choice. I thought that Nico's fantastic work on the animation of the earth (clouds, buildings, etc.) would be enough, but I probably should have implemented a visual gauge system a la Reigns to make the action more comprehensible.

Here you go, I hope you enjoy playing it, please leave a comment if you want us to make updates or just to give us a nice compliment!

Our game got the second place at the prize-giving, 2nd place we are very proud of!

2050 Complexity is now available on Playstore