Ecomaniac

• 

  Main Menu / Title Screen

• 

  Forest area in the game

• 

  Landfill section of the game

Inspiration

Our team wanted to create a video game for our HackUCI project. While looking at the prize listings, we realized that we could crossover between a lot of categories, so we came up with the idea of an educational game about sustainability and the environment. In this way, we hope to raise more awareness about current and future environmental issues, its detrimental effects, and what we can do to improve.

What it does

Ecomaniac is an educational video game. It is a point-and-click exploration game that teaches the player about some of the causes for environmental damage. With a setting of a dystopian version of our world a couple years later in the future, you–an employee at The Environmental Protection Agency–are assigned an important task: examine a company’s operations and discover what they have done that leads to environmental degradation as well as useful information about what we can do to save it.

How we built it

We built the game in the Godot game engine, using GDscript (a derivative of Python). We also used Blender to create the environments and various photo editing tools to create other art assets. Additionally, we also used GitHub in order to work on the project at the same time.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge for us was creating the environments. We created the environments in 3D with Blender and then used Blender’s compositing tools to create the pixel art images. None of us are great at art and it was the first time for us using this workflow. We had a very tight schedule to learn and create the environments.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re very proud that we were able to finish it in time and to our original goals. Our planning allowed us to effectively create the assets for our game, which in turn led us to finishing in time.

What we learned

We learned quite a bit from this project. All of us got experience designing our own games, and we all learned how to use Blender more effectively. The intense timeframe also made us better at planning and prioritizing elements of the project.

What's next for Ecomaniac

Ecomaniac will probably not change much in the future. Fixes to any bugs that are found and possibly the addition of music, which was something we did not plan on adding.

Built With

• blender
• gdscript
• github
• godot
• python