Inspiration I was inspired by the question of how much money is a human life worth -- understanding that a human life is priceless, I wanted to present another question to the player of the game; How come the lives laborers are exploited in pursuit of a "greater" good? Why should the price of bread be higher than the price of charity? I am motivated by the idea of inspiring a community to learn to not take the labor of others for granted, and in order to achieve this, I represent the hardship of laborers through the lens of a visual novel. Hence the title of the project, "Behind What We Consume", by learning to appreciate we must first ask ourselves, how many hands and machines have our belongings been through, just so we are able to afford the product?
What it does It brings awareness to the wrongful actions of labor exploitation, primarily in industrial based areas, where workers are paid only up to a few cents per hour to produce. Technical wise, this project is a pixelated game which focuses mainly on dialogue, player movement, and different maps. The story summary can be viewed on the attached YouTube video.
How we built it I built it on an application called Godot. I also used a few open-source material such as tilesets. Character designs were done entirely on a website called Pixilart.
Challenges we ran into A major challenge I ran into was time management. I believe this is mainly due to the fact I only discovered this hackathon 3 days prior to its due date, and therefore I was under alot of time pressure. Another challenge is the fact that I had to tackle this solo project alone. I believe that with more teammates, I would be able to complete this project much faster and with much better quality as I would have more people to consult when I ran into bugs, errors, and dead ends.
Accomplishments that we're proud of The main accomplishment I'm proud of in this game is the story building. I believe the story building is able to vividly picture the desired meaning, while also adding some humor to make it more lighthearted. Other than that, I also think I accomplished a good character design.
What we learned Firstly and most obviously, I learnt how to operate game engines. This was quite a weight lifted off my chest, as it's always been one of my dreams to be able to create video games. On top of that, I learnt that in order to pick up a skill (say, game development in this instance), you must begin with a clear and specific goal set (for example, making a pixelated game), and not a goal that is too broad (such as "simply wanting to learn programming"). This makes the process much easier as you will know exactly what to learn to get to where you want.
What's next for Behind What We Consume Once Behind What We Consume is out of the development stage, I will publish this game on Steam for free.
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