Wild Fire

Inspiration

We have been following the recent news concerning the devastating wildfires in California. We wanted to develop a game that would allow us to better understand how climate change affects the propagation of these fires and the challenges inherent in combatting them.

What it does

Wild Fire is an educational game in which the player combats a fire spreading through a procedurally generated grid of trees, clearings and rivers. An initial fire is propagated through the forest using a complex calculation which takes into account the wind direction, the humidity, the temperature, etc. The player combats this either by strategically deforesting areas of the forest to block the spread or by calling in planes to drop flame retardant. As the player progresses through forests, the rivers become more scarce, the temperature increases and the air becomes dryer, representing the effects of climate change on the spread of forest fires. In later levels, it will be essentially impossible to preserve most of the forest, representing the inevitable, disastrous consequences of climate change.

How we built it

We used Godot and GDScript to make this game, and collaborated using GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we encountered was balancing the game. A complex medley of interacting factors govern the spread of the fire in the code, and ensuring that the spread was neither too slow or too quick was vital to keep the game interesting. Furthermore, we encountered a couple complex merge conflicts that were difficult to resolve.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of how visually polished our final project in comparison to our past Hackathon games. It includes particle effects and animations which greatly benefit the user experience. We are also proud of the organic-feeling spread of fire.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned a lot about the various factors that influence the spread of wildfires and tactics employed to mitigate them. Two of our team members were also new to Godot and learned a lot about how to use it.

What's next for Wild Fire

The next step would probably be to increase the realism of the simulation to include other effects of climate change. We also want to extend the game to other types of natural disasters.