UBC Fisheries Game
Game Designer
2009
Description
The UBC Fisheries game is an educational game for high school students about marine ecosystem fragility. The gameplay exists to express three critical messages. First, ecosystems are fragile, and small actions can have wide-reaching consequences. Second, all living things are interconnected. Affecting one species ends up affecting many others. Third, ecosystems require human management and maintenance.
Character concept art
The goal of the game is to build a sustainable fishery that your children can inherit when they reach adulthood and make enough money in the process to support your family. The game is driven by an accurate scientific model of the Georgia Strait marine ecosystem, developed by the Fisheries department at the University of British Columbia. Player actions are processed through this model, and the consequences of those actions are dynamically represented through the health of the ecosystem and the success of your fishery.
The game mechanics are designed to accommodate the way teenagers tend to play games. Teenagers tend to be in a state of continuous partial attention where they spread their attention spans across a variety of ongoing tasks. To effectively reach the game's target audience, it was designed to be playable in short sessions so player's can easily multitask without sacrificing the experience.
User interface mock-up
Roles and Responsibilities
I am the lead game designer on the project. I'm responsible for creating a fun and educational experience that will resonate with the target audience. Included in this task is effectively managing the use of the simulation data, and shaping it in such a way that retains the overall messages while creating an interesting play experience. I work closely with the art and engineering departments to create a shared, coherent vision.
Technologies
Ecopath is the scientific back-end crunching the numbers associated with the ecosystem model. An adapter was written in C# and .NET to connect the simulation data with the game engine. Blender serves as the game engine, controlled by a set of C# and Python scripts.
See Also
Please check out the following related resources: