One Earth was a game I worked on when taking IDEA350, an intensive course on game design and development taught by Professor Christopher Weaver at Wesleyan University. In the course, I was in a team of five, with two other artists/designers and two other coders. We were tasked with developing an educational video game for elementary school age children. Our game was One Earth, named as such for the fact that it would take five Earths worth of resources to sustain the world if everyone consumed the amount of the average American, with the goal being to reduce that number down to one.
One Earth focuses on teaching kids about the different ways to dispose of items, and the differences between trash, recycling, compost, e-waste, etc. The goal: reduce the five Earths metric down to just one by utilizing sustainable habits. The gameplay is focused on kids identifying which bins items were supposed to go to and picking them up around the map. As they put more items into the correct bins, their score decreases and the Earths wane until there is only one left.
As a coder/designer for this project, I developed the speech and text system for interacting with NPCs, scoring systems, and main gameplay. Upon our team's realization that the original gameplay might be a bit too monotonous, I proposed we develop three unlockable minigames to break up the gameplay and teach different concepts. I designed, along with the other artist, these three minigames, which taught students how plastic bottles were recycled, how compost was used, and how batteries and e-waste were reclaimed. These minigames were vital to our game winning the course, as a panel of professors and game industry professionals appreciated its approach to teaching. This course taught me how to work in a multi-disciplinary team and the basics of a Scrum/Agile workflow, along with increasing my knowledge in Unity and C#.
