This assignment was to: “please prepare & put on your blog an approximately 1-page treatment for an interactive video game designed to increase awareness of sustainable behavior, both on and off campus. Your target group is college students like yourself. The ultimate goal of this game is to cause lasting behavior change for the players. Your game needs to include story aspects and, most importantly, it needs to be fun to play. Here are a two of things to consider before you start:
- What does sustainability actually mean?
- What sustainable enhancing measures area already in place on and off campus and what kind of changes are desirable or realistic.”
The Frontier
You are a Hunter/Trapper that has just move to a new area of the frontier, you must trap, hunt, and gather to survive. You will develop your skills and become more adept at hunting, fishing, and trapping, but you will have to learn to balance what you harvest with what you need. Because all resources are finite and will disappear if they are over harvested. An example of this is you become very adept at fishing. It becomes easy for you to catch fish and you continually fish at the same spot. Eventually you will catch all the fish in the area and no more will respawn ever. Once a species is destroyed it cannot return. The adaptive AI is programed to reproduced flora and fauna at various rates for all harvestable items. This is based on a complex equation that factors in such game aspects as; weather/season, amount of resources present, and random factors such as disease or fire. If you learn to manage your environment properly you will be able to trade pelts and meat to other tribes and individuals. Trading will give you access to rare resources and better equipment. As a player character you must learn to work in unison with nature. Your survival in The Frontier depends on it!
The frontier is a 3rd person perspective, survival, resource management game that will feature graphics suitable for mobile devices and mid-range personal computers. The Object of the game is to become proficient with hunter gather skills and balanced with the eco system.
On initial offering 2 modes of play will be included, a regular mode set in a warm zone forest and a hard mode with a cold zone forest that has large seasonal temperature shifts. Later expansion will be added to allow the player to experience different ecological zones with varying degrees of difficulty such as Jungle, tropical island and savanna.
Jason, this is an incredibly cool game design!! I love the focus on human necessity and survival, but the logistics involved as far as developing skills and simultaneously learning how to maintain balance and be smart with how you do what you do. That’s a really important aspect of how things are in the real world that I think some games might leave out- like a game that lets you catch fish over and over and over, when in reality there are only so many fish in one body of water. Your approach is logical and reality based and I think would teach valuable lessons in survival and critical thinking about survival. I appreciate also that your game deals with not only human survival but survival of ecosystems and species.
Awesome stuff!! Thank you for sharing this with us.
Nice, I like the idea of being a hunter/trapper in a survival setting. Most survival/maintenance settings I’ve seen are usually on city building or like the game Factorio. This also differs from most hunting games I’ve seen as those are… well… just about hunting but not the concern for ecosystem maintenance. I think this game will do great!