Current Sea | Devpost

Initial ideation using Canva
Rough gameplay loop
Inital dialogue
Initial dialogue cont.
Game design documents
Initial ideation
Initial Ideation

Inspiration

We felt inspired by the aesthetics of 90's NES games, classic PC point and click adventures and everybody's favourite level: the underwater level! Edutaintment is a genre that is generally unseen, but due to the fact that many people of all ages are unaware of ways to improve your credit score, or good money saving habits, this has a strong prospect to be presented to people.

What it does

We've aimed to help the player learn good credit habits and spot some of the potential dangers when it comes to saving money responsibly. Combined with the playful setting and daft dialogue we've tried to make financial education as accessible as possible. For Fish all ages!

How we built it

We used software such as, Photoshop, for our art asset design. GameMaker to compile our code and programming. And Discord for communication and updates within our team. We also used FL Studio for creating sounds and music.

Challenges we ran into

Trying to manage the chaos of designing a game from scratch, creating custom art and sound design from the ground up and coding the interactivity of the whole game, all within 24 hours was our main challenge. But as Game Design students we've learnt how to rein in our initial project scope and that certainly came in handy for the game jam, keeping a lid on all of our early expanding ideas felt testing for all of us! Another challenge we ran into is that a lot of us are more confident in the art/design side than programming, meaning that work was not divided in an equal way, and since programming is an activity that starts late into the development process, this meant that whilst the artists did the brunt of their work early and had time to refine their activities, the programmer had to work massively in the later parts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Current Sea's final state is quite simplified, but working on it in the future would give us more time to add more events, so that the player is less likely to see the same fish twice, and can also learn more facts. We also could add different difficulties, with a variation on the chance of encountering harder questions. Another aspect we could work on is dynamic music, that keeps a similar structure to the music but changes the feeling and melodies whilst keeping everything grounded, and also changes depending on what is happening in the game. An example would be a suspicious melody playing when the loan shark appears.

What we learned

Something important we learned was to divide essential and inessential tasks from our game. Since we're game designers, our creative minds will want to add more and more to our game to make it perfect, but an important aspect of game jams is that we cannot have everything we like. By creating 'stretch goals' for ourselves, we could do the essential things faster, and this was motivating as the things that we wanted to do to make our game win were part of these stretch goals.