COMPOSTING GAME
ROLE
Lead Designer
DESCRIPTION
Composting Game was created with the intention to educate people on the benefits of Composting. I created this with a similar team as Pirate Wizard, where we all worked hard to create this idea. We wanted something laid-back and not as huge as our previous works. With 4-days to create this project, we went through a very brief idea development stage, but built on a very simple idea.
YEAR
17th June - 20th June 2024
GENRE
Third-Person Education
PLATFORM
PC
LEVEL DESIGN
Development Day 1
Composting Game was a part of our Social Action Project for our first year of college. We developed this game with the information of Composting as the main source of information for our game. Composting relies on a 50/50 equal split of Greens and Browns to produce high quality and effective compost to help grow crops. When we first began the development of this Game, we were unsure of where we wanted this game to lead to, but focused more on what we wanted to educate. So for Day 1, as the Designer of the game, I set to make a very simple prototype of collecting Green and Brown Cubes to fill the two bars whilst avoiding the red glowing cubes which would damage the player. This was a very simple proto-type, mainly designed to grasp a simple idea and branch to a more wider vision in the next 3-days.
One of the areas that I wanted to improve on from Pirate Wizard was how quickly I jumped into the design and looks of the level before properly creating some of the later mechanics or even experimenting with enemies and combat, so for this project, I kept the first iteration of this game to a simple degree, relying on Cubes and the default character, focusing on functionality, not tiny details that for a first version would go unnoticed. I personally saw the start of this project to be a bit soulless, lacking a lot of elements and being a boring idea, which is perfect. To have been able to take something I was cautious and unsure about and make it into what it is was great, this is one of my favourite projects from an educational view, and as someone who enjoys games with similar themes as this one.
Day 1 Recording
Development Day 2
For the second day, me and my team worked on making the composting element from Day 1 into a properly designed game rather than relying on cubes. During this, I felt like we needed more to the game, something that would make it repeatable, but to have a purpose as to why you would want to repeat it. So I started working on a secondary area that would act as a HUB world that would let the player travel to different levels located inside of this world.
Day 2 Recording
Development Day 3
Creating this HUB World in the previous day led us to think about what more we could do inside of this location. So I started working on a workbench that would allow you to rebuild different pieces of your farm, this led to implementing a coin system so that once the level was completed, you'd gain some coins to use on the workbench. This began our interest in filling the environment with small details or leave gaps to be filled by later assets to further enhance the idea and location of the HUB World.
Day 3 Recording
Final Product
Full Playthrough
Project Reflection
To have already created a game the week before this one, and to immediately dive into making another one was a lot to take on in such a small amount of time. We also had one less day to work on this project by a day, but I can defiantly say this project improves a lot on what we did with Pirate Wizard. We accomplished a lot with Pirate Wizard, but took on a lot in comparison to other teams, so this project was a lot more relaxed and laid back, we knew we had a deadline, but the huge necessity to document and create our own idea wasn't a huge worry this time. There are still areas that I would want to improve on regardless of this being better, we have a couple of issues with the textures not fully loading until a couple seconds later, a slight issue with the workbench, and the overall repeatability can be a bit boring. If I could, I would add a third level to the game to add more variety than this large complex maze or collecting the same 10 items in level 1.
My favourite element of this whole project is the incorporation of the workbench to re-build this little farming location. I've also learned a great deal of skills from this workbench and having interactable elements within a UI. I hope that in the future I can look back on this project as a real starting point as to what my design skills are capable of and how they have grown in the future.