Sustainability Game Draft

Inspiration:

Our younger siblings and cousins who love to play and learn from games understandable to them.

What it does:

The game allows the user to experience how the economic and environmental intersection of the energy sector impacts our lives but visualized in a very simplified way, which could be understood by kids as well. The objective is to save the bear by purchasing a freeze ray, which was built in a factory that emits emissions. The user for simplicity, earns an income just by saving the bear, but also has to spend quite immediately to keep the polar bear safe. The game exits if the iceberg melts or if the factory emission targets reach capacity. Keeping the game in "equilibrium" is our gateway to allow users of any age to explore thinking of better ways we can keep the earth in economic and environmental equilibrium as well.

How we built it:

We used html, css and javascript for the basic functioning of the game. We styled the web application to have a video game theme, drew some figures and pngs, and wrote javascript functions to implement counters for income/money spent, a button control on the freeze ray to reset the polar bear after being saved, and for some animations of the sun and carbon emissions.

Challenges we ran into:

Html is mainly used for simple web design so our project is simplistic which is what we needed in terms of representation but the overall aesthetic could have been more advanced. In participation for the CalgaryHacks2025, we weren't able to complete our ai ideas in time, so we resorted to a quick way to demonstrate our overall idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

Being able to implement our idea, create a game and having our siblings play the game to prove whether or not it is kid-understandable.

What we learned:

The irony behind the game. It reflects our everyday lives as the products we purchase to improve the environment, actually contribute to the environments worsening. The game is quite difficult to keep running for a long time since natural factors such as not having enough income to buy a freeze ray make it easy to lose. For development, we learned games involve recursion a lot.