Game Designer, Project Lead, Jam Participant
Environmental Learning Game
Solarpunk Game Jam 2025
Day Zero Games
Shipped on PC and Web
Overview
A twist on the 4X genre of games (explore, extract, exploit, exterminate) the game will explore if humans can balance living in harmony with their environment.
The player will be able to farm, collect resources and establish settlements to provide humans with their fundamental needs. In order to succeed, the player must balance the human need for extraction and exploitation with giving back to nature and preserving their own home.
Gameplay overview video of Nature Needs Nurture Too!
Created by engineer, Steven Lilley
Creating a game for the Solar Punk Game Jam.
Learning and Experience Goals
- Player understands that climate change solutions must be observed in long-term time spans, over many generations
- Player understands what tools and technologies we have available to us to fight global warming
- This includes native histories and religions/cultures entwined with nature
- Player understands how civilizations can work with nature in order to best take care of themselves.
- Cult of the Lamb
- day/night cycle and abbreviated lifespans
- Generations naturally occur
- All necessities of life must be dealt with:
- Waste
- Food
- Shelter
- Democratic Socialist Simulator
- Choices must be difficult and have benefits as well as drawbacks.
- It shouldn’t be obvious if there is a “right” way to play
- Placement Inspiration
- Dorfromantik
- Islanders
- Terra Nil
Game Loop for MVP/Prototype
After the player chose what their building priorities were we would reflect their decision back at them through a generation time skip so they could see the cost and benefit of their actions over the long term.
- NO big numbers
- Like Cult of the Lamb, start with the play experience of adding one or two humans in the civilization.
- Let the balancing numbers start out as 1:1 as possible
- This helps with player cognition, if you can’t understand the math, the player definitely won’t – learned this from Otters
- Agile development isn’t the correct scale for Game Jam timelines
- I didn’t realize how much I’d learn about the game I designed once I had a prototype in hand. Not only is this maybe not the greatest game idea for a two week jam, it requires a ton of iteration and work which I had to come to term with our engineer that the balancing Wont be good because it just takes time.
- Dog fooding the prototype helped open me up to maybe a smaller game that was funner with what we had which was nice art and a great placement feel
- Goes without saying, start way smaller
- I looked at this jam as an opportunity to make a game like this that has been banging around in my head for a while.
- I don’t regret pursuing this idea, i think i'm actually really excited with this prototype of the game and feel like I can better visualize iterations of the game that reduces it’s complexity.