M4 Master Aquasolace Gaming for Future: A video game about water scarcity in Brandenburg

The goal of our project was to develop a game together with the NABU about the Water Scarcity in Brandenburg. Gaming For Future, is a single-player strategy, environmental simulation, and awareness game centered around the critical issue of water scarcity. Our goal was it with this game to draw people’s attention to the crucial issue of water scarcity through Game-Based Learning approach.

NABU (Naturschutzverband e.V) is an NGO with approximately 900,000 members (more than 1% of the population) environmental education, spreading of public awareness, cooperations with local groups, institutions and authorities to promote nature-friendly policies

Core elements: Biome tiles: Biome tiles to reconstruct ecosystem by placing different biome tiles.

Thresholds: Each biome tile affects temperature and ground water level differently.

The player can place biome tiles on the map. Each tile has different influences on the water level. Level Selection: Each level visualised different initial environment conditions (ground water level & temperature) and unique threshold values

Challenge: The challenge lies in the learning process, where players must discern the impact of each biome tile on the ecosystem.

Winning / Losing: Players must navigate and manipulate these environmental factors, ensuring they remain within specified threshold values unique to each level

Our team included Eliot Hoff, Kenneth Englisch, Cong Nguyen-Dinh, Adib Ghassani Waluya and our supervisor David. We divided the tasks equally and spend the first few weeks with researching and planning the game. We tracked our project progression via Github and communicated via Discord.

For this project we used mainly the Unity Engine to develop the game. Other programs that we used were Figma,Photoshop and Excel. Sometimes we had to use Blender as well. Coding was done in Rider, Visual Studio. Discord was used for communication.

Aesthecially pleasing: Our own highly stylish rework models of assets using Blender from Kenney for an appealing aesthetic

Calm music: Our own produced music contributes to the game’s atmosphere, creating a more immersive and relaxing environment as well as providing a serene backdrop for focused gameplay

Localisation: built with localization in mind and currently available in 2 languages (en & de)

Unity: With Unity 2022.3.12f1, GFF is developed for ease of development, portability, and longterm support.

Keyboard: 1-6: select a specific biome tile. Q-W-E: brush sizes (Q = small, W = medium, E = large). ESC: pause menu. Mouse: LMB: place a tile. Scroll wheel: camera zoom. Mouse drag to screen border: move camera.