Common Ground

Inspiration

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you read the words “climate and land management”? When coming together to develop this project, we found that each of our answers looked a bit different. We come from the east, the west, and even all the way from the Pacific (Guam), each location presenting its own challenges that we were passionate about addressing. During our discussions, we worked to make sure that this project would empower teens and young adults to make a difference in their communities.

What it does

Common Ground is a cozy pixel game where young people help neighbors make real land-use decisions and watch the consequences unfold. You create a character, tell us where you’re from, and arrive in a biome built from real satellite data — our first is the Tropical Island, modeled on Guam, where one of our teammates grew up. Five characters across the island each face a real problem drawn from Guam’s actual land challenges: soil erosion on a family farm, a village rebuilding after a typhoon, a fisherman watching his reef go grey, a community pumping one shared aquifer, and a town whose water turned strange as development moved in next door.

Each scenario plays as a short story with interactive decisions. You choose how a farmer covers her field between plantings, set a tiller’s depth and drive it along the contour, tag which houses flood in the next storm, pack a go-bag against the clock, time fertilizer around a seven-day forecast, and compose a public comment for an environmental review. Every choice changes the scene in front of you and moves four indicators the UNCCD challenge itself names: soil, water, vegetation, and community well-being. And every scenario ends with a Knowledge Card that explains the real version of what you just did, cites the source behind the rule, and hands you a real action — a watershed planting day, a public comment window, a village meeting. The game’s promise is the challenge’s own success criteria: make a meaningful choice, see its consequence, and understand why it matters.

How we built it

We built Common Ground as a desktop web game in React, with every screen following a pixel-game design system we locked early: chunky ink borders, hard shadows, a pixel display face for headings, and a readable body font for dialogue. Scenario content lives in plain JSON files over a small set of reusable interaction components (choice cards, sliders with live consequence meters, drag-to-sort, timed grabs, forecast scheduling, map tagging, statement composing), which let our non-coders write dialogue and choices while the code was still being built. Every consequence rule is simplified but evidence-informed and cited in-game — USDA NRCS for soil practices, UNDRR’s Sendai Framework for disaster scenarios, USGS for the aquifer numbers, NOAA for the reef.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was deciding what kind of game this actually is. We started down the path of a Civilization-style management sim — budgets, turns, a city health score — before rereading the problem statement and realizing the brief asks for something different: a learning experience where a person makes a choice, sees its consequence, and understands why. Cutting a working prototype we liked was hard, and it was the right call. We also had to learn an honest art pipeline on a deadline: we love games like Stardew Valley, but their assets and characters aren’t ours to use, so we built our own blocky character style and generated original scene art from written descriptions instead. Finally, grounding five scenarios in real, citable science — and resisting the urge to invent convenient numbers — took real research time: the aquifer scenario alone runs on USGS projections we had to read and simplify responsibly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud that the game is personal: one of us grew up on the island it depicts, and every number in the Tropical Island biome is a real projection for a real place, not game balance. We’re proud of closing the loop the brief cares most about — every scenario ends in a real-world action a player can actually take, and learning is checked with a question before and after each scenario rather than assumed from gameplay. And we’re proud of the architecture: because scenarios are content packs over reusable components, a new biome is writing, not engineering, which is exactly what a maintainable public-benefit tool should look like.

What we learned

The hardest thing we learned is that blending education with engagement is genuinely difficult. Every scenario forced the same negotiation: make it too game-like and the lesson evaporates, make it too accurate and it stops being fun. The surprise was that the game taught us first. To make the scenarios credible we had to research Guam’s actual climate and sustainability issues, and we came away knowing things we didn’t at the start. We were building a game to spark curiosity in players our age, and the process proved the concept on us before anyone else ever played it.

What's next for Common Ground

The Tropical Island is biome one of six. Next is the Arid Drylands biome — desertification is the founding mandate of the UNCCD, and our scenario framework is ready for it — followed by the Urban Megacity, where the largest share of young people actually live. Because biomes are JSON content packs, we want regional offices, teachers, and local youth groups to author their own: the goal is that the game eventually speaks every player’s landscape. On the feature side, we’re building out the walkable scenes with our character system, multiplayer stakeholder scenarios where friends negotiate one shared resource, and deeper links from Knowledge Cards to live local actions — real comment windows, real planting days. The brief’s optional extension points at educational credits connected to real restoration funding, and we’d love to explore that with UNCCD directly.