Mar 18 – 22, 2024
Most of the team is off to GDC this week, the rest of the team is focusing on implementing new design decisions, creating physical prototypes, then playtest and iterate gameplay.
Design update:
- Focus on plastic. We are replacing other categories of recyclable with various types of plastic and plan to explore how plastics are recycled/handled
- The role money plays in our game: instead of motivating players with the abstract idea of monetary gain, we are adding the concept of money to our BIG THREE boxes (burning, burying, and dumping in sea)
- Adding “recyclable processing facilities” as an expensive but investable resource to encourage player to sell leftover recyclables
- Abstracting the countries we are representing, though the differences between developing countries and developed countries will be suggestive enough
- Table set up design:
- Costs of the three common ways of dealing with waste: burning (affects sky/air), burying (affects soil), sea dumping (affects ocean)
- Costs of recycling through processing facilities
- *pending* Temporary storage with long term costs
Art pipeline: Component Studio
- Ease of use in terms or organization, fabrication, and playtests
- Can be integrated with game crafter and tabletop simulator
- Card drafts:
Prototyping and playtesting:
After playtesting with Chris, we were able to reduce our complex mechanisms down to a more comprehensive level while still simulating the reality of recycling. We started from a complex set up like this:
To a simplified version shown below, without sacrificing the real-life concepts we wanted to shed light on, which are:
- It’s cheaper to go with “bad options” (burning, send to landfill, send to other countries, dumping into the sea) than “good options” (recycling and investing in recycling facilities)
- It’s more cost efficient for developed countries to send trash to developing countries
- The important role of economy in recycling
- Trash doesn’t magically disappear, they are circling around the world
- Visualizing the invisible damages “easy” options cause (ex: cards piling up on landfill, etc)
Check out an example walkthrough of our current gameplay here:
https://youtu.be/1eIbyJjsiaE