Design Document: [Link]
Happy Earth - Game
Happy Earth is a 2D virtual pet mobile game that has players looking after an island sanctuary and the wild critters who inhabit it. Happy Earth was aimed at younger children with the goal of educating children about the effects of climate change in a way they could understand, and to help develop environmentally friendly behaviours.
Happy Earth was originally concepted at Climathon, a climate focused Hackathon. This game concept was developed over 3 months at the Victoria Entrepreneur
Bootcamp in a team of 5.
TASKS
Game Design, UX/UI Design, Character Art, Prototyping and Pitching
2018-2019
DATE
The goal of Happy Earth was to be both an entertaining mobile game for children, as well as an educational tool to help introduce these children to positive and environmentally concious behaviours. Happy Earth took inspiration from games such as Pokemon-Go and Neopets, focusing on a game loop that emphasized the players relationship with the characters and being responsible for their well-being. Anthropomorphism would make a complex and abstract concept such as environmental responsibility something more relatable, with the game's critters serving as an analogue for being responsible to the environment.
The actions players would do in-game would also emulate real world behaviours; cleaning up rubbish from natural environments, sorting recyclable materials, planting trees. In this instance we wanted to show realistic rather than abstract tasks, our goal was not to merely raise awareness of the subject but also to encourage real world behaviour by showing players what actions they could potentially take in their own lives to help the environment.
Trailer used in our final pitch presentation to potential investors at the end of the Victoria Entrepreneur Bootcamp.
The environment and climate change is a major issue facing the world and we needed to make this issue approachable for children. This meant characters and game mechanics both had to be tonally appropriate for the age group, bright and colourful and fun, but still accurately representing a serious global topic.
Bird character design explorations. This was the first character I designed and would set the visual style of critters to come. The critters were designed to be themed around a specific recycling method, this bird was "paper" themed.
An early issue we encountered in development was that the critters were intended to act as anthropomorphized recycling bins who would eat recyclable materials. However this raised the concern that with an audience of young children it could inspire negative real world behaviours such as attempting to feed rubbish to the family pet. As a result we pivoted mechanically, and visual designs moved away from the critters made out of the materials such as the oragami bird design.
Play instead revolved around real world behaviours we wanted to directly encourage, cleaning an environment of materials and planting trees would attract critters to encounter the player. Here the player could feed and pet the critters and "collect" the critters in a manner similar to bird watching. Originally the intention was for the player to hatch the critters in a manner similar to Tamagotchi, but we instead pivoted to have the creatures come and go, similar to an idle game such as Neko Atsume.
Giving the critters this freedom was also good to impart the lesson that wildlife is wild and free, and responsible interaction requires leaving them be. This made the focus to observe and protect the critters on your island, rather than claim ownership over them. Because critters could take time to show up, this also put a naturally occurring exit point in an individual game session, addressing a concern from parents worried children would be glued to their phone.
I wanted critter designs to evoke images and themes that the players would likely be familiar with already. I designed critters to have distinct silhouettes, as the guide book would fill with outlines of the critters the player could potentially find, but had yet to encounter.
Designed a simple animation to show how the creatures would communicate with the player. The intention was to have a combination of body language and distinct emotion icons to improve clarity for the younger children in our target audience. Having both would assist in understanding how the non-human avatars were reacting to the players actions, I would also want to use this to teach the children body language signals common in animals without ambiguity.
What I learnt
My biggest takeaway was:
Working on Happy Earth gave me the opportunity to work on game design in a new context and the chance to collaborate with various stakeholders outside of design and provide some practical experience in a formal business oriented development project. I was able to utilize my game design experience to translate the desires of non-design personnel into the design space. This project had much more of a business focus rather than an explicitly creative focus, and I learned a great deal from the bootcamp mentors about how to run a small business; doing appropriate market research, designing with revenue streams in mind, effective communication with investors and stakeholders, and establishing connections with experts in other industries relevant to the business.
What I wish I could have done better:
This project was challenging. I had significantly less creative control than in previous game design projects, as there were many more stakeholders influencing the game development. Development was a balancing act between representing the desires of environmental engineers, parents, teachers, children themselves as well as the potential investors. This too had to be balanced with planning the business model, marketing strategy and revenue model, whilst ensuring the game would be both ethical and legal due to the audience being young children. At times this made for an overwhelming amount of information and little time to analyze it. I wish I could have dedicated more time towards Happy Earth and give it the attention it demanded.
If we had more time to work on Happy Earth:
We would have liked to see the game come to fruition, however as our team did not feature a skilled mobile developer we could not develop the game internally and would require outsourcing a developer. I ended up taking a step back from the product after our final presentation. I was at the time still working my regular job and would be starting my Masters program shortly after the bootcamp concluded, I would not have been able to dedicate the time necessary to continue development into release. Ultimately it was decided Happy Earth would be handed over to a team from the Victoria University of Wellington Engineering department, accompanied with all existing game assets, game design documentation, market research and business planning.