I was very drawn in by the amazing storytelling from the ideation document. I love the core gameplay idea and the actual default/combo actions and what they do. I think they make sense in this gameplay and also play a role in limiting what the player can actually do.
One thing that caught my attention is that although this game sounds like a fun one to play ( lots of cool characters and their unique roles), I am a little worried about whether this game would do its best to educate players about the root cause/solution to the climate change issues. I think this is just coming from the grey area of either to make a game more fun or to make it more educational, and it is hard to combine both. I think the turn recap phase really helps with the educational aspect of it, and using that to your fullest (even adding some explanations of the root cause of the climate change issues) would be great.
Overall really cool ideas! Can't wait to see how it turns out.
Viewing post in Team 1-P Project Ideation jam comments
Thanks so much for your comments!
That's a great point about connecting the game more closely with the big picture of climate change. We liked how the PDF in the jam resources talked about how not every game needs to be focused on both in-depth education and emotion in order to be effective, so I think we are landing more on the emotion side. That said, I agree that the game shouldn't be devoid of approaches for addressing climate change. Within the relatively small regional scale of the game, I think we're trying to land on the importance of regulatory changes at the policy level for protecting key carbon sinks like rainforests. It's definitely just a subset of the societal changes needed in the coming years, but hopefully it presents something that feels both impactful and actionable for players.
We'll keep this concern in mind as we work, and hopefully it will remind us to present the narrative in a way that's connected to the big Whys and Hows. Thank you again for the response!