Game Title
Carbon Clicker

Developer Name
Team Yuzu

Short Promo Blurb
an incremental clicker game that gives players a challenge: “What can YOU do to lower the world’s carbon footprint?”

Full Description
“Carbon Clicker” is an incremental clicker game that gives players a challenge: “What can YOU do to lower the world’s carbon footprint?”

Players take the role of a person intent on fighting human-led climate change. They start with simple actions (“turn off the light!”), but as time goes on and the world gets warmer, players will need to ramp up their actions to save the world.

Promo Image(s)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OW3ALcWvin0zPCtfET1cIiacVA69KifL?usp=sharing

Promo Video
https://youtu.be/gscHMiz_luY

Artistic Statement / Use of Theme(s)
When many people hear the term “climate change”, their first feeling is guilt – that they aren’t doing enough as an individual to tackle the climate crisis, and that their personal “carbon footprint” is too high. Or, they try out lifestyle changes like active transit and becoming a vegetarian, only to realize how small of an impact those actually have on global emissions reductions. This leads to feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness.

In following this jam’s “Change the Story” theme, we wanted to highlight a different narrative: fighting the climate crisis not through individual action, but collective action. Organizing and mobilizing mass movements of people has always been the way to create systemic change. Fossil fuel industries know this, which is why they’ll do everything they can to stop it – including promoting the concept of a “carbon footprint” to make us focus on our individual actions.

We wanted to create a game that takes players through this same realization: we will take down the fossil fuel industry by directing our efforts toward collective action, not obsessing over individual choices. The game introduces players to ways they can step into collective action, such as through direct or political actions. The game also emphasizes the importance of rest and community care, which are important but often underlooked parts of organizing.

We decided to make a clicker game because we liked their simple and incremental nature, allowing players to uncover knowledge and complexity through play. Both of us (the creators) are involved with Sunrise Movement, so we used our experiences to inform the game choices. We also employed a playful-but-serious tone and art; climate change is important, but the journey to fight it and build a new world should be filled with joy.

Development Summary
The core idea of the game from conception to execution had largely stayed the same. Some secondary ideas, like an avatar creator and some buttons, fell by the wayside.

The two of us, Jamie (story/writing) and Derek (programming/art/sound), did experience some initial bumps in the road in terms of what main tool we’d use to build the game. We started out with orteil’s (creator of Cookie Clicker) Idle Game Maker to try leveraging already-built tools but we couldn’t implement the features as we wanted with it. Derek was able to build a web-based prototype in TypeScript within a few days thankfully, which proved to be flexible enough to accommodate a growing amount of content and number tweaking. It was also difficult for Derek to produce the code, sound, and art by themself but it was a challenge they wanted to tackle. We also wished we playtested with more folks on the Climate Jam discord or with friends in-person to get a better sense of which parts of the game worked or didn’t.

One big surprise was only finding out the “main toy” of the game after the preproduction phase. We discovered what felt the most fun to us was clicking all the buttons in sequence, waiting for them to finish their cooldowns then repeating the process. It felt like a nice micro game loop that keeps you engaged every few seconds. We expected to find this out during prototyping but given the indecision around game engines, we understand why we found it later.

I don’t think there was much we wanted to cut except some visualizing of growing people power. Initial designs would show an avatar for the player (either customized or preset) that would center the game’s UI. As the game shifts from individual to collective action, more and more folks would appear along the avatar, representing the collective that the player becomes a part of and is actively growing themself. However, it would’ve been tough to implement and design visually so we opted for a dynamic background of a growing mushroom cluster instead, since it was easier to add as well as didn’t take up UI real estate.

Release Plan
Right now, the game seems at a good spot in terms of art, sound and code stability though we feel there could be more of a climax after choosing a pathway towards the final “Destroy Fossil Fuel Industry” button among other game design-related problems. We noticed that the game’s story started following a three-act story structure, of which the “pathway” phase is the third. We’d like to add more buttons for that part to introduce interesting twists/modifications to the core gameplay, to both build up excitement towards the climax and differentiate this part of the game from the earlier parts. We also want to find more use of the “CO2 Saved'' resource, either narratively or in gameplay. We initially designed this number to be an arbitrary goal for players to reach, as a way of expressing the belief that, “if I reduce my carbon footprint by this much, I can solve climate change” Perhaps we can implement an early idea we had where players would have some arbitrary CO2 Saved goal to reach that scales more and more to show the futility of isolated individual climate action.

We’d also like to incorporate more information and story on a Just Transition to renewable energy, since countries need adequate renewable energy infrastructure to say goodbye to fossil fuels. There would be a new resource, “Renewable Energy %” representing the proportion of energy on some national grid that’s renewable. To enable the final “Destroy Fossil Fuels” button, players would have to reach some threshold of “Renewable Energy %” as well as the current requirements to show there are both infrastructure, social and cultural prerequisites to moving off fossil fuels.

After the jam, we’ll share the game online for free, with friends and possibly in climate- and game-related online communities, to encourage people to engage in collective climate action. We’d like to start up discussions, perhaps even include a Google Form for feedback on whether the game was enjoyable and if players were inclined to participate in climate action afterwards. We plan to work on it further if there’s enough demand from players or there’s enough time and motivation on our ends.

To improve the accessibility and shareability of the game, we’d also like to improve the experience on mobile browsers. This would include loading optimizations to help the game run better on slower Internet connections and possibly redesign the UI/UX to make better usage of smaller device sizes. We could also explore the idea of a native app that wraps the web-based game, to enable possibly better performance and access to native features.