Operation Climate Change

Computers for Education - CMSC 309

This is the Project Repository for the "Operation Climate Change" Educational Game

Game Walk Through Video

Check the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6NQBneGt0I

Team Members:

• Kelsey Anderson
• Jesica Maria Ramirez Toscano

Summary of Game Design

Operation Climate Change teaches ten to twelve-year-olds about the social and ecological impacts of global warming.The goal is to provide 10 to 12-year-olds with an understanding of how their behaviors in daily life relate to the global environment. They should develop an ability to change their behaviors and think critically about their community’s impact on climate change. This game primarily teaches through its immersive storytelling. The premise of the story develops around our main character: the spy through a time travel journey to discover how climate change destroyed their futuristic community. The game progresses through five main missions that cover a learning trajectory beginning with observing the global impact of climate change and ending with the knowledge needed to develop real-world solutions. The gameplay involves a mix of item gathering, simple puzzle solving, action, adventure/battle gameplay, and exploration. The basic gameplay controls stay consistent but solving puzzles become more challenging.

Minimal Viable Product: Operation Climate Change Prototype

Goals:

To create a prototype of our larger learning game that includes:

• The inital outer world of the game and the two key protagonists, demonstrating what the overall game play is like.
• To demonstrate necessary elements for game play: the avatar's health meter, a meter measuring the health of the earth, an inventory for collecting items and the time machine for time travel.
• Three mini-levels, the first with only two small tasks and the next two with 3 tasks each. In the first area we demonstrate how we teach bacis gameplay and obeservation of the environment. Then we skip ahead to collection and analysis of greenhouse gasses: first asa a collect and observe extercise in level 1 and then in a more strategic way in level 2.

More about Operation Climate Change in our Design Document

Implementation Notes:

• We made use of a large number of handmade, modified and prefabricated free assests from the Unity asset store. In addition to building fire, smoke, the sun, earth (complete with atmosphere) and many other textures and objects, we also notibly used:

  • Recon Boy (human avatar): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/recon-boy-12208
  • A moderately modded Jellyfish Girl (human avatar): https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/character-model-jelly-fish-girl-47735
  • Sci-Fi Stylized Modular Pack: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/sci-fi/sci-fi-styled-modular-pack-82913
  • Unity Samples: SF UI elements: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/unity-samples-ui-25468

• Though our ideas are fully formed and immersive, this project represents a steep learning curve for us from programming assignments earlier in the course. We recognize there are several bugs remaining in the most recent build.

  • If you experience difficulties, often taking actions that trigger updates - like travelling from one scene to the next or collecting extra objects can "unstick" the game.
  • In our video, we (or Jessica mostly after editing out Kelsey's cursing), were playing from the Unity Editor. Only afterward, did we notice we can build and run from the OperationClimateChange.app file. This is strongly reccomended. It isn't perfect, but it is much smoother!