Our final prototype

A single player policymaking simulation card game where players role-play as a city’s mayor and rebuild an unsustainable city into a better one through playing different policies cards, which increases the four indexes – Environment, Social Stability, Life Expectancy, and Prosperity. Along with this prototype, there is a collection system having all the information of each policy card and categorizing all the cards with SDGs.

What went well

Communication

  • Within the team: Since the start of the project semester, almost all of our meetings and discussions are very productive. Beside regular meetings, we use our core hours to not only work on our prototypes but also use our rest hours to talk about project related topics like card information, which can optimize our time to invest our prototypes. Whenever we need assistance, we can always reach out with each other to work together.
  • With client: We have regular meetings with our client and personnel who maintain communication with each other. Our client is a great listener and actively provides suggestions for us. We are lucky that our client is willing to help us with adjustments and improvements on our game. As a result, our relationship with clients becomes very productive and leads to a positive outcome. 

CMU news interview

  • We are lucky to be invited by Michael Henninger to an interview to talk about our game concepts. It was published on the CMU news site for Earth Day. As the process went on, Michael concluded our interview into a news article, which not only advertised our game but also motivated us to work harder for the rest of our project semester. 
  • Link : https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2022/april/global-goals-game.html

Barriers Breakthrough

  • The Sustain Dev had experienced many difficulties. For the earlier stage, we were focusing on finding the right game mechanics to make connections between the players and the 17 SDGs. Instead of making a regular city simulation, we combine card elements into our city development game. In order to scale down the 17 goals, we design four indexes to categorize the 17 SDGs and use them as the final achievement of our prototype. Most importantly, in order to deliver our message to the players, each card will have variable effects on our indexes during the gameplay while showing the policy description and relative SDGs. Although the scale is large, we manage to fulfill our clients’ requirement by showing all the SDGs information in our game. 

Team cooperation

  • For this project, the Sustain team has an unspeakable tacit agreement on the game, which leads us into an efficient cooperation. Regardless of our roles, we are actively helping each other from every aspect – from the overall gameplay to every card’s information.

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