Some Thoughts :

Developed as a Public Outreach project for my program in Mellon Public Humanities for Social Justice program. When I first pitched this game as a part of my research project ,it was intended to be an adventure game. The idea was that you would meet other people on the island, escort them to safety and learn about mutual aid and hurricanes. While I was writing the research paper, I was hyperfixated on the game "Homeland" for the gamecube. I thought it'd be really cool to add multiplayer elements. I was speaking with my mentor, Ricardo Miranda, and he suggested I check out the game "UTOPIA" by Don Daglow. A real time strategy game that has players building hospitals, schools, crops and dealing with pirates, armies, managing money and HURRICANES. I thought it'd be very cool and unique for a Gen-Z kid to make a game inspired by a title in the 80s...

The game's design intentions was to do for Utopia what the game "Pikmin" did for popular Real Time Strategy games...translating dense mechanics into something simple. Little did I know, Pikmin makes up for that simplicity with pacing, mission structure, and obstacles. They turned what is experienced in a Starcraft match into a game-long mission. I thought distopia would be like that.

The game had a simplistic scoring system. It wasn't consistent and typically you couldn't even do anything diferent to change up that score. it made no sense. People enjoyed the grey-boxed prototype at first, simply give aid to all 10 houses. the Coqui in the game existed along with the flag mechanic, in which they follow to reposition them away from the hurricane. Then i decided to add an additional character that could be playable. This caused some discomfort and confusion, as players found it difficult to manage the player, the dog and the frogs. "How do you win?" people asked. "It's a score attack game" I say. No one understood it.

I'll say the best thing I learned while working on this game I've learned is to keep things simple. Keep the rules simple. Let it naturally get complicated...trying to force it as "deep" will not work. People also liked the cute graphics, I just think the gameplay was a bitter pill for them to deal with.

Video of Project

edited in Davinci Resolve. Shot on iphone 14.