How can games help people engage in the global challenge of gender equality and foster good ties for children and youth around global agriculture in the face of climate change? The main goal of our concept was to create an applied game that maintained the fun of an entertainment game while focusing on new gender dynamics between the two main players. We started by making a two-player co-op game where you play as two siblings together, following their story starting on a barren farm, now incapable of growing food because of drought, through the mountains and villages to find a better life. We wanted to focus on the dynamic between the two and how it evolves over time. When you start the game, they perform tasks that are expected of their gender. Our goal is to show that over time, they realize that they are not limited and can do anything they want.
Because we wanted to make a game that took place in a real country, one of our main objectives was to get as close to reality as we could without losing the clarity needed to communicate clearly with our Western audience. Our university students did a lot of research on multiple subjects like the environment, lifestyle, gender roles, clothing, and day-to-day life. We then took these results and converted them into assets. We had a few occasions where we realized, due to our playtests, that certain assets needed to be adapted to a more westernized style because they failed to communicate what we intended to our playtesters. When we started the project, our goal was to make six different chapters. We ended up scaling that down to five. We felt that by combining different parts of the story, we could make it clearer and more packed with gameplay instead of drawing it out.
Life is getting more difficult on the farm. Crop yields have gone down over the last few years, and this year is particularly bad. At present, you are the only two children in the family. Your parents have passed, and now you have to seek opportunities elsewhere. It is said that you can reach Europe from a town near the coast. However, the journey there is long and dangerous, especially for you as two young children. You gather the last bit of food you can get from the land and set out on your journey. First, there are puzzle elements where characters need to help each other due to their physical differences; the boy is larger and stronger, while the girl is smaller and more agile. These are not just physical differences but also social differences due to what the characters are accustomed to in their village. The boy takes the lead and is able to perform more actions than the girl is able to. Later in the game, this is switched, and they have the same amount of interactions they can do. Puzzles involve differences in literacy; the boy is able to read better than the girl. They need to work together in order to progress. The girl is less educated and is able to read less. Once the children come into a town, they fall back into the tasks that they are accustomed to doing according to their gender roles.
We decided that our audience would be a Western audience. We want to show them, through a gameplay experience, what it's like for children in countries that rely on agriculture and also suffer from climate change. We playtested our game on two fronts: we tested it gameplay-wise to see if it is fun to play, if the gameplay is clear, if there are bugs, and if people understand what they need to do, etc., and we tested the clarity of our message. Do people understand what the game is about? Do they realize why they have certain gameplay roles depending on gender? Is the story clear? Do they feel like they play an evolving dynamic? One thing we noticed in our playtests is that we had to westernize a lot of things we had in the game. Players didn't recognize certain objects for what they were because they didn't fit a Western standard. A good example of this is the graves of the parents; we had to add a cross to them to communicate clearly that they were graves. We gave the story a clearly recognizable Western pattern: Act One was the introduction, Act Two was the journey and the confrontation, and Act Three was the resolution. Another thing that we did for clarity was giving the two main characters clearly defined colors. The girl has pink and red tones, which are represented in almost all interactable objects and VFX for her. The boy has blue tones, which are represented in the same way. If we had the time for more iteration, we would have liked to add more narrative, more small interactions between the two players, more variety in environments, and more challenging puzzles.
In the game, you will learn a lot throughout the game itself. In Chapter One, you will learn the controls of the game, but in a way that doesn't feel like a tutorial. Chapter One is perfect to learn the controls because you can take your own time. There's no timer or any type of fast action you need to accomplish. Later on in the game, it gets a little harder, but by then you will know all the controls and have mastered them enough to play those levels. In the first two chapters, you haven't got any choices, and this feels really linear, but this way, we can steer the players in their raw behavior. When you enter Chapter Three, things change. You can talk to NPCs and walk around freely. If you proceed to the next level, you need to steal food in this same town. Here, you can have two different options to play the game: you can either steal the food quickly, and the villagers will run after you, or you can steal the food sneakily and not get caught by any villager. When you proceed to Chapter Four, you will encounter hyenas. The goal is for the girl to protect the injured boy if they offer a bridge at the end of Chapter Three. We chose to let the hyenas only attack the boy because he is the easiest prey; he cannot run very fast. At last, you have Chapter Five. We want to make this more like an emotional level and not with that much gameplay. You can read some stories on the signs with real-life quotes of some stories. When you walk to the end of the path, you encounter a boat that brings you to Europe.
We chose to make a digital game. The engine we chose for this was Unity; it was the most accessible for everyone because we all had worked with it before. There are several different systems that are responsible for interactions. We kept them all separate tech-wise, but they work together to create a working experience. By doing this, we prevented the possibility that one bug would break the entire game. We wanted extensive audio with different layers. To achieve this, we used FMOD. This gives us more freedom of possibilities compared to the Unity audio engine. For the art, which was a stylized 3D style, I found that it's an easily achievable style that is accessible and clearly understood by most audiences, as it's quite simple and not hard to comprehend.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.