Description

Me and the team created this game for the 2019 Ukie Student Games Jam, the theme was sustainability and had a focus on the UN's new sutainable development goals. We decided early on that we wanted our game to raise awareness about climate change and the increase in forest fires, given at the time of writing the amazon rainforest fires were still ongoing it seemed like a good cause to bring awareness to.

The game follows you, a lone firefighter, deal with forest fires in a variety of ways using your tools and the environment to your advantage. You can use the hose to directly put trees out or alternatively soak trees so they are much less likely to catch fire at all. You can use your axe to create air-gaps to prevent fire from spreading, and strategically isolate the current fire.

I was the sole programmer on this project and thus my focus for the majority of the time was on designing and developing a forest fire simulation which would be in depth enough to allow players to take logical environmental actions that would make sense in real life. This involves simulating the water content of the trees as well as the distance between trees and the current fire's area. I also spent some time writing code that interacts with Unreal Engine 4 Materials so that the trees could burn slowly and have their leaves fade over time to give visual feedback to the player.

I completed this game jam with the help of:

What I learnt.

During the game jam we had a variety of problems which surfaced, both on the technical and scope side of things. The entire team overscoped the game intially wanting to include an opening cinematic and a lot of other animations, we had to scale back around halfway as we understood that it could not be completed. We all learnt to manage our expectations and limit feature creep.

On top of that I learnt more about how to manage source control in large teams, this game jam inclduded 6 people which made the use of git necessary. We used branches to individually perform work and then merge once the features are complete, this is something I had rarely used before and used even less in team settings so this was a good learning experience for me.

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