Live Towards Death

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

DOWNLOAD: https://ruzhang-zhao.itch.io/live-towards-death

Game Concept

An extraterrestrial observation machine tried to record the planet‘s diverse lives before extinction.

In the game, players need to experience as many creatures as possible before extinction. The animals will constantly become different organisms with various habits and abilities in the food chain after being preyed upon.

Gameplay Design

1.Animal’s Habits and Abilities

2.Food Chain GamePlay

In this system, the players can become predators when they are preyed on.

To experience more characters, the players need to keep the animals they control eaten by other animals and start a new life.

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.

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

3.Energy Bar and Extinction

To prevent the players from losing motivation to collect, we introduced two countdown-related mechanics to the game: energy and extinction.

The actions of animals consume energy, while predation can return it. When the energy is depleted, the animal will die and scavenging ants will eat its body. This is a soft punishment mechanic: players need to forage and plan their routes or they will turn back into ants and waste time.

Extinction, on the other hand, limits the game’s total length. In the end, all the animals experienced will be shown on an achievement screen, an idea from Jenova Chen’s Journey, where you can know the name of the player who accompanied you to the destination.