Story Board and Advanced Feature
Our game's main method of educating players about climate change is through the decisions the players have to make and the storytelling that accompanies them. As a result, we chose to select fixed level generation and multiple endings as our advanced feature. It is crucially important for a storytelling game to have a good and varied decision tree such that the impacts of each decision is neither trivial nor limited to stats changes, this way the game has higher.
Throughout the game, players are faced with quests that impact their town. Some of these have immediate effects on the town's metrics, while some of these impact decisions down the road. Major decisions that have lasting impact is tracked through a token system to maintain a clean decision tree. Using a naive branching decision tree for our story would result in over 400 leaf nodes. To help with navigating the json, we have created both a hand drawn decision tree for visual understanding, and a comprehensive explanation of each json field for the story line json.
The player can traverse down multiple distinct paths while playing the game and either win or loose the game on different leaf nodes. We made two design decisions to represent this and give feedback to the player. The first is we have created three custom end scenes, one for loosing, two for winning with different stats. When the player reaches endgame (either win or loose), one of the appropriate scenes will play to provide visual and aesthetic feedback on the state of the game.
The second is that during the winning end screens, the player will be greeted with a dialogue that summarises all the major decisions they made throughout the game, both good and bad. When combined with the visual effects we aim for the end game to be impactful and give the player some time to reflect on how the decisions they made in game could reflect some of the problems faced in real life.
