Intro
Beijing International Game Conference 2021 Gamejam
Theme: "Biodiversity"
Award: Best Theme Award, Best New Designer Award
Engine: Unity
Date: 2021.07 (48h)
My Role: Game Designer
Game Concept
Players need to play an alien civilization-made observation machine, responsible for the biological extinction of a planet before the approach, through the "experience of life" way, record the planet's diverse biological traces left behind.
In the game, the player will constantly become new creatures after being preyed upon and experiencing their habits and abilities.
We want players to feel the diverse habits and abilities of animals in the natural world in an interactive and immersive way, thus creating awareness of nature conservation
Gameplay Design
Animals
Ants
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Have special color vision
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Can see and feed on tiny fungi in the scene
Frog
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Can cross the pond
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Frogs can only see moving animals
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Cannot enter the desert
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Catching distant prey with an elastic tongue
Snake
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Press Ctrl to enter "thermal vision mode", all animals will be highlighted
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Spray venom to hunt distant animals
Bat
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Flying over obstacles
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Limited vision, press Shift to chirp, sending out ultrasonic waves, temporarily expand the field of vision
Owl
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Flying over obstacles with super high speed
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Top Predator
Food Chain GamePlay
To reflect the theme of biodiversity, we want players to experience more animals
While designing, a biological theory inspired me: when an animal is preyed on, the predator will break it down and digest it into small molecules like amino acids, which will then become proteins in the predator's body.
To do this, we designed a food chain system: the player can be progressively preyed upon by more advanced animals, and become a predator.
Death by predation becomes the aim of the game: the player needs to keep the animals he controls preyed upon by more advanced predators in order to experience all the creatures in this biome before they become extinct
This adds a philosophical dimension to the game. Heidegger once said that the meaning of our life is "being towards death", which also inspired the name of our game
Hunger and Extinction GamePlay
Player Born
While brainstorming, we ran into a problem: players can always experience all the animals if they play long enough. This can cause them to lose motivation to collect
So, we introduced two countdown-related mechanics to the game: starvation and extinction.
The actions of animals cause energy to be consumed, while predation can return energy. When the energy is depleted, the animal will die in place and its body will be eaten by scavenging ants.
This amounts to a soft penalty mechanism: players who do not actively forage and plan their routes will turn back into ants and waste some of their time. The addition of decomposers also makes the food chain more realistic
So, players need to hunt as much as possible to survive until they catch the chance to be eaten by advanced predators. In the test, this gameplay was very interesting
Extinction, on the other hand, limits the total length of the game: players must keep completing the above process within a limited total time. During the trial event, many players got hooked on our game in order to experience all animals within the time limit
Use Ability
Forage And Survive
Being Eaten
Become New Animals
Get New Ability
Extinction
Show the Animals Recorded
Game Flow: Hunger Cycle & Extinction Cycle
This brings our game closer to the reality of nature and encourages players to forage for food and survival like animals do
Extinction fits well with the theme of biodiversity, and players implicitly felt the horror of extinction, and in the comic at the end, we suggested that many extinctions come from the destruction of nature by humans