Chircuts Clean Up

Inspiration

We were given a topic, climate change, and we spent quite some time brainstorming ideas related to it. In the end, we've decided to not spend a lot of time covering details we've already learned in school, so we aimed to incorporate substantial climate advancements that may not be as well known, such as the Sargablock and permeable sidewalks, drawing from both sources we've seen online, and in-person.

What it does

We ended up making a visual novel! Simple to use, and ripe with visual examples, it's a quick introduction to eco-friendly construction practices! Our team has spent a lot of time on the art portion especially, with every asset (other than the real-life pictures) being hand-drawn on Krita!

How we built it

As mentioned previously, the art was done on Krita by two artists (there may be a little difference in style), and the visual novel engine is Ren'py. We used Visual Studio Code's live collaboration function to speed up the coding process.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we all decided to go with Godot. A lot of our ideas were very lofty, with gameplay ranging from challenging and complex to playtimes of over 1 hour... Of course these would be hard to implement, so with heavy hearts we had to crunch, crunch, and crunch our game more and more... and then came the technological issues with Godot. It was divide and conquer on day 1, we had one coder who didn't have any Godot experience at all to boot. Luckily, the art went by smoothly though. On day 2 (today), we woke up early and decided to switch to Ren'py, quicker than Godot, but we'd be sacrificing gameplay for efficiency, and condemning many hand-drawn assets to the shadow realm... which we did.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Simply getting the game to function in itself is a bit of a miracle since we've been running on sugar, and lasagna for a majority of the development time. I must admit that the background art is absolutely stunning, and that Chircuit's new model is simply adorable! I would also like to give a heartfelt thank you to all of my teammates for being so patient during this whole process!

What we learned

So. Many. Things. Like always trust me when I say "this isn't gonna work out". Should I list out everything we learned for the sake of brevity?

Discuss the game vision with the group, thouroughly
Make sure everyone is on the same page for the game vision
Every hour or so, check your schedule to give the team around ~1 hour of wiggle room, because Murphy's law states that "if it can blow up, it will blow up"

What's next for Chircuts Clean Up

Oh my, so many ideas! With infinite resources and time, I'd like this to become a full-blown eco-construction game, from geographical location selection to the kind of shingles used for roofing. Of course, if we're keeping this realistic, I'd simply like to add a bit more content to the visual novel, and maybe make the images a bit more colorful!