Team Scale: 4 People
Role: Game Designer and Programmer
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What was the goal of this project: The goal of this project was to teach people about the effects that over-fishing has on the environment.
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Process: When joining this project, I first focused on how we would teach people about the effects that over-fishing has on the environment has on the environment within the confines of the clicker genre. I decided it would probably be best for the game to have some sort of news heading system that updates in real time to the players progress throughout the game in order to communicate to the player on what exactly they're doing. After this I shifted to working out the implementation of this mechanic, where the person doing narrative for the game wouldn't need to interact with the system directly in order to make implementation easier on everyone involved within the game. After deciding to make and write narrative containers to contain the news headings, I decided to write the system itself. Where there would be news headings scrolling through the screen in a specific area and once a news heading would be off-screen a new one would be randomly selected from the list within the corresponding narrative container.
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Reflection: The development of the news heading system did not go the smoothest, various design changes throughout the development of the game forced the system to change multiple times during development, sometimes even forcing the container format to change too. Also the system ran into various limitations that would cause it to break, such as changing the resolution of the game during runtime, which still would break it even in it's current iteration if it were possible to do that. However the development of this system has allowed me to refine my design and debugging skills as things needed to change on the fly multiple times throughout development.