Chop Chop Inc. Design Thoughts

So this all started with our teams programmer, the skilled Raphael Priatama, who suggested that he really wanted to work on a real time mesh splitting algorithm, and that treecutting could be a topic we could then make the game about. This prompted us to do a lot of research on the causes and effects of deforestation, and we pretty quickly decided that this was going to be the topic we wanted.

The basic idea was quite simple, you get dropped into a forest, and told by an unsympathetic and pretty overtly evil character to go and cut down trees. While you do this, you see the effect this has on the environment, both through cute animals that you scare away, and through an admittedly rather hamfisted colour gradient that tints everything in depressing grays when you destroy too much nature. The main turning point then comes, when it is revealed that you were not really cutting the trees for their lumber, when your boss orders you to burn down the remainder of the forest to make space for farmland (a real and shocking practice from our perspective). This is then supposed to cause a shift in player behaviour as they reflect on their actions and realize how harmful and destructive they were, after whcih point they can replant trees and attempt to bring the forests and their animals back, or continue on with their work, while still learning the reality of the situation.

Admittedly the main challenge of this project was the sheer scale of the environment we were tackling. 3 areas, each with unique flaura and fauna, was going to mean a lot of assets, but aside from planning, structuring and keeping an eye on this process I actually had very little to do with it. My main task was the Unity implementation, as we realized too late that the other designers on our team did not feel comfortable working in Unity at all. This meant that I not only had to do all the UI scripting and other frontend stuff, I also had to implement things like our audio. It was quite stressful and a lot of work, but we managed to pull it off with barely any crunchtime (only a single day for most members of the team, if at all), which for me proved that I have grown as a scrum master.

The main thing I took away from this project however, is that I had absolutely no idea how to properly implement audio in Unity, so immediately after the project was over, I asked a friend of mine, and amazing sound-person, Avery Fukawa, if she could show me the ropes with fmod and other audio software, so I could rectify this blind spot of mine. I still wouldnt say I am great with audio or anything, but at least now I understand the basics.