Rizzing Up Invasive Species

This Visual Novel aims to entertain and educate about invasive species. Included with the visual novel is a webscraping tool used to update the list of invasive species found in Massachussetts.

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Inspiration

A big inspiration for us was the visual novel Tax Heaven 3000, which is a visual novel that is also a functional tax filing system. The user can actually file their taxes using it. We felt we wanted to do something similar in that we wanted to create a practical visual novel to promote awareness about the impact of invasive species on the environment.

We also drew inspiration from Doki Doki Literature Club and Monty Python for our ideas, storyboards, and humor.

What it does

Our project is a game that educates the user on a few selected invasive species. Players will learn about the species, what kind of damage they cause, and how they can be combatted. A page full of all invasive species in Massachusetts with info and links scraped from the Introduced Pests Outreach Project is integrated into the menu.

How we built it

We built the visual novel using the RenPy framework, which uses python. We also wrote the web scraping script for getting data in python.

What we learned

Only one of us had used RenPy prior to this project, and none of us had any experience with webscraping. We had to learn these technologies while working on the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The webscraping tool is fully functional, with the information integrated into the "Extra Info" tab of the visual novel. The Visual Novel contains three full routes, each focused on one character, which teaches in humorous ways about what to do and not to do when encountering invasive species.

What's next for Rizzing Up Invasive Species

This project could be expanded by adding additional "routes" focusing on other invasive species, or by adding to the storyline to the existing routes.

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