Designed as a way to teach pollution prevention in an interactive way, we have created a farming simulation game! As the farmer, your job will be to plant and harvest crops while minimizing pollution.
After thoroughly weighing our options, we decided on something informative, light-hearted, and fun to tackle the issues of sustainability and management of emissions in agriculture.
Our game has the player run a farm on a tile based map, where they can buy farm plots, upgrade equipment, and choose how to change their landscape to fit their farm's needs, for better or worse. Over the course of the game the player's choices will show their consequences through rising and falling levels of pollution/emission, arrival of protestors to stop overpollution, and various environmental events related to the ways in which they choose (or don't) to destroy the environment around them.
The game was built in Unreal Engine 5, using many of our own hand made assets and textures as well as tiles and props from sets found on itch.io.
We faced many challenges in the form of finding appropriate themes, goals, and organization for our project and, in turn, for the player when in game. Initially we had planned to complete what would turn out to be too many tasks, and had to pare down to something more manageable within the time frame we were given. We also had difficulties initially with collaborating simultaneously on files, and being able to find tweaks each team member could make on their own work to help each others' go more smoothly.
One accomplishment we've all made is becoming better versed in various aspects of Unreal Engine. We also feel that for our first Pickhacks event, we've pulled something very impressive together. Many of the mechanics in our game seemed potentially too difficult to implement given the amount of time we had, but we still managed to pull them together, and get a nice coat of paint on top as well.
By the end of the project, we learned how to better streamline our operation so that each team member was working as efficiently as possible to produce work that others would need in a timely manner, keeping progress fairly steady from everyone. We also learned the specifics of each person's designated tasks, such as editing tiles, formatting assets, coding in sounds and mechanics, well enough that we could each modify our own work to make implementation as easy as possible for everyone.
Our group hopes to continue work on the game to fully flesh our a number of features that we had hoped to add, as well as polish the visuals and sounds. We considered adding credits to the end of the game as well and posting it to be played, as well as posting a video of it being played and explaining the inspiration, with the hopes of reaching several people with the game's message.
Despite me and my team's hardwork, Unreal 5 could package our project into an executable. We sincerely hope that whoever judges our project knows that we genuinely put out best foot forward.
Next time, we will strive to compile early in order to ensure that packaging goes smoothly.
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