The Idea

The idea of the game I have proposed is a real time strategy game which requires the player to run a logging and wood processing company to complete orders from Big Co., a fictional company which orders the players product and gives them a time limit to complete the order in.  If the order is not completed in time the player will not get payed.  Run out of money and the players company goes bankrupt.

To begin the game the player starts with an office/depo and a sawmill.

From the office the logging team leaves each day to cut down trees.  They travel quickly along the road to their destination and begin their job.  For every day a team works they have to be payed,  to increase productivity more team would have to be hired so more tress could be cut down.

After a period of time the loggers will finish a block and move on to the next.  Loggers can only move 2 squares away from a road tile as if they move any further they cannot get help in an emergency.  While I have not planned to add a case where there is an emergency the rule is there to limit and challenge the player.

After the player has gone through learning how to use the loggers the player will receive an order from Big Co.  The order will give the number of wood units wanted, price for completion and the time the order has to be done by in order to earn money.

 In order to complete the order the player must move the cut logs from the logging site to the wood mill to be processed and sent which requires logging trucks.  Logging truck are sent out from the office and can only travel on roads.  They are able to carry a certain number of logs per trip(in my example I made it three) before they have to drop off their load.  They can only pick up logs from squares adjacent to the road, diagonal included.  After the truck has dropped of it load it can return to the office or go out and collect more logs.

In order to collect wood from further locations roads must be built so the logging trucks can collect cut logs. The cost is that road take up space which could be used to grow more trees, but allow access to more trees to log.

In order to make the company sustainable tress must be replanted in order to have a future harvest after all the original trees have been cut down.  I am not sure whether to have a separate team that replants trees or use the loggers, but either way you will have to pay them in order to replant, which would cost about the same as paying a logging team to log.  The choice is then whether to spend money on logging more trees and earning money or planting them so you will be able to continue making money.

I believe that by trying to run this company that the player will learn how important it is to manage our natural 

resources so that they don't run out and possible how big companies can be pressured into making bad decisions in order to make money faster.

The mechanics of the game will be:

-Time based goals: the player will have to complete orders to make money and stay in the game.

-Play till you're dead: the player can continue to play the game until the point at which they run out of money and 'die'.

-Increasing difficulty: the game will get increasingly harder as orders become larger and require less time per unit to complete.  This of course means the player has to spend more money on logging teams an trucks in order to complete orders in time and make a profit.

-Day/Night cycle: during the day the workers work but at night they go home and rest.  The game will give a overview of the day when night arrives and then skip to dawn.  The player must realize that the further away a starting site is the longer it take the loggers before they start work, also the further away a end site the sooner they must end work in order to return home in time for dinner.

Things I have considered adding are upgrades for logging teams, trucks and roads which make the process of outputting units of wood quicker, such as upgrading from gravel road to asphalt to allow trucks to travel faster, although I am not sure how this would affect the game play I have in mind and won't make it a certainty until I do.

MDDN 243 Assignment1 hand-in

Here is the three perspective views of my character that I designed.

He is a spirit of the road.  The idea is that it is kind of like a man made taniwha.  After looking up the different types of taniwha I found that the river taniwha, described as a whale sized tuatara or gecko was the most appropriate, as like a river the road is long and winding and provides transport.  At first I thought of making it tuatara looking, but when Ben gave me the idea of contrasting a spirit of the road with one of the river,  I decided to make it look like a gecko as the river spirit would be a tuatara.  I believed this showed how much more powerful the river spirit is compared to the road spirit as the tuatara is a much more dominating image than the gecko.  In the end I think this was a turn for the best as the gecko looks a lot leaner and faster than a tuatara would have, which I believe shows the in which the road is used for transport compared to the river.  Speaking of here is the sketch for the river spirit and some planing on drawing its face from earlier last week.
 
 

The river spirit looks more like a natural tuatara than the road spirit as the river is a natural thing, the road spirit on the other hand has reflectors and road stripes on it to show its man made nature.  

The point of this is to show that man has more respect for the river than the road in terms of environmental awareness.  While the road may not be a very environmentally friendly thing it self it is still part of the environment we live in and deserves the respect that rivers do, ie. not using the roadside to dump rubbish or throwing rubbish out of windows.  While this stuff does happen on rivers it is more likely to happen on the road.  Man has this belief that because is is man made it is more resilient than say the river, but our modern roads are still young, which is why the road spirit is so small while the river spirit is so large.   I will explain further when I post the rest of the hand in later.

CCDN 271 Assignment 1 Hand in

 Lars Hopman

A Quiet Revolution produced by Earth Council, is a short documentary outlining the importance of water in our world and what certain individuals are doing to help maintain it. There are three cases presented each looking at a different point of water conservation. The first is rainwater harvesting in rural India, second is water pollution in Slovakia, and reforestation in Kenya which helps the rain soak into the earth and allow for fertile earth.

The film does show some great points for designing for water management for the 90%. The first is how important water is to the economy. The first case outlines this clearly, the village, which went from having not enough food for themselves, to having excess to sell, after sorting their water shortage.

Next, solutions must be affordable and upkeep-able by the people who are using it. As most of people in these examples are low income villages they cannot afford to pay for powering massive water pump that runs on petrol or uses power as most of them do not even have power lines to their village.

Lastly, sometimes rather than looking at what we have now we should look back at what was used before to manage water and improve those designs, especially when designing for low or nil energy cost.

The documentary main aim is to show how little governments are doing to solve these problems and how individuals have to step and do it themselves. The documentary does this by emphasizing the problems dramatically, help along by narration from Meryl Streep. This leads to questioning if the problems are really that bad, but with the interviews with experts, most of whom work for the UN or are Nobel Prize winners it does lend validity to their argument. Also helping is quoting that the united governments of the world spend ten times the amount of money on military than the required amount for water management which is not yet being met.

As a designer watching this documentary we should see an opportunity to help our world, not for finical gain now but for the economy it will build in the future allowing for further design opportunity and possible greater gain in the future.

Reference

SGIVideosOnline (2007, May 29). A Quiet Revolution [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfB0doRI_dc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HveMaSP6TZw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feW_NxpCnCo