Hi there Itch!

Before deciding to work on Galaxy Garden, I was seriously thinking of working on GEO. I’m not going to use these design ideas, but I want to leave them here in case someone sees some value in them and wants to pick them up.

Description: "With global warming approaching, the mostly arctic nation of Greenland is in crisis of disappearing. Playing as a quasi-scientist wanderer, you have 5 short years to navigate it's depths, saving its final treasures before they are lost to the sea."

Some quick Googling of “climate change Greenland” revealed this NPR story on peat fires northeast of Sisimiut, the second largest city in Greenland. A few notes from the article:

• The fires are far away from any towns, but reindeer hunting season started recently, and these fires could threaten their habitat.

• The ground in this area is permafrost, which is melting and exposing dried peat: super concentrated plant matter that is very combustible.

• When it burns, peat doesn’t spread across the landscape, but down into the ground. This might not exist in real life, but this is video games and I imagine an underground cave filled with peat and other rotting matter that could catch fire and burn out. EXCITING PEAT CAVE ACTION!!!

• The dark soot that these fires will kick up onto the glacier could accelerate the melting.

Back in the early 90s, there were two action games that played with the idea of firefighting: The Ignition Factor and The Firemen.

I had the itch for a bird’s eye view, Zelda-style action RPG, so here’s a pitch for Level 1: You, the “quasi-scientist wanderer”, have a water tank strapped to your back and fire hose. You put out peat fires in gameplay inspired by the firefighting games above. Water is your ammo. You can collect:

• Water bottles (small amount of ammo)

• Water jugs (medium amount of ammo)

• Fire extinguisher (low ammo, but It’s very effective)

• [Other items and powerups here]

Your goal is to venture into the peat fire, save the occasional stranded hiker or reindeer hunter, and at the end save a herd of reindeer trapped in a spooky peat cave. It might seem a little hokey to say that the reindeer are one of Greenland’s treasures, but then again, I have no connection to Greenland, and as this NBC article says “Reindeer are very important for the people who live in Greenland because they often use wild meat sources to supplement their main protein sources...They probably won't come back to graze here for quite some time until the landscape has recovered, and it will take years to recover”.

Note the message in the gameplay mechanic. This is about struggling against faceless forces of nature that are running amok thanks to human actions, and that point is expressed though game mechanics that are fun in a conventionally video game-y way. My bigger 3D project takes exactly this approach, and I at least haven’t seen a good example of this since the original Deus Ex. More games like this should exist. Steal this idea!

Thanks to Emily Haasch for submitting this Famicase.