The Energy Case

Development time: 4 months

Number of developers: 6

What I contributed:

-Ability Design

-Enemy Design

-Big Part of Core Concept

-Big Parts of the Narrative

-3D Models

Drawn by fullychaoticdiss

Main Design Challenges:

-Educate young adults about Climate Change and the Energy Transition

-Keep the game fun and make the education less forced

Game Description:

Set in a Dieselpunk robot insect society dependent on fossil fuels to keep themselves running. You play as an ant private detective named Dec who has been hired to investigate the murder of a scientist heading a project attempting to create a 100% renewable energy power source. Along the way you discover that there is more to this case than Dec originally thought and are thrusted into an action adventure mystery that teaches through its innate story organically.

Drawn by fullychaoticdiss

Concept Contributions:

When we were deciding on a way to weave in our main themes of energy pollution and climate change into a fun game for our target audience, we only had various vague ideas of how to accomplish that. One such being the idea to create a detective mystery game to make it a direct investigation of the causes, but the concept seemed to lack the crucial glue that would tie it together. This is when I gave my idea for making all of the characters robotic, physically needing fossil fuels in order to run, which mirrors how in real life we don't pollute willingly but as a result of the way the world is run. This instantly gave us a mystery to solve with a good setup and a very organic inclusion of our goals into the story.

To go with this once we fully settled on the Action Adventure genre for our game I gave the idea of different kinds of paths that change the ending, I wanted to tempt the player by offering them more flashy and visible abilities through a polluting path and a less powerful but ultimately better green path. This choice the players would make in the game proved to successfuly make them reflect as it mirrored how in real life people will need to make sacrifices in order for us to stop climate change.

Enemy Design: Ant Grunt

Fighting Style:

-Uses a pistol
-Will take cover if cover is close by
-When behind cover will pop out and shoot 2 or 3 shots before ducking back under, the shots will be spaced out and relatively inaccurate, 30% accuracy, giving the player time to take aim and fire at the weak points
-When not under cover will just shoot and after that move around until it finds cover
-Becomes problematic when in high numbers requiring the player to make each of their shots count when they and the enemy are exposed, this helps incentivise the player to go down the polluting path as it can give ways to clear larger groups of these.
-Is instantly 1 shot in melee which can encourage more tactical play

Stats:

100 health
30 damage per hit
30% accuracy rate

Weakspots:

Head - Will instantly die upon being shot in the head
Engine - If you do 50 damage to the engine the ant will explode and deal 70 damage to other enemies standing next to it, players themselves will be damaged too by this however

Design Context: We needed a basic enemy type that would be recognisable and visibly less threatening than the rest while fitting the look of an enemy who's main threat is numbers. For this I suggested the basic ant as it both shows that average citizens(the ants) are being dragged and used by the corporations to throw up against the player to attempt to stop them, hence why I also made them poorly armed and generally very weak.

Drawn by fullychaoticdiss

Enemy Design: Wasp Grunt

Fighting Style:

-Uses an SMG
-Will try to rush the player, putting extra pressure on the player once they are in the field
-Their shots are innaccurate but numerous, will spray out 20 bullets with about 15% accuracy to them
-Have a deadly melee attack with their stingers
-Stinger will have an animation wind up giving the player time to roll out of the way
-Can momentarily fly up to shoot over cover into the player

Stats:

100 health
5 damage per each shot landed
50 initial damage stinger hit, leaves damage over time effect which we can call bleed or poison that will add up to an additional 20
15% accuracy rate

Weakspots:

Head - Will instantly die upon being shot in the head
Engine - Acts more as a setup to the next weakspot
Wings - If you shoot it in the wings when it is flying it will instantly crash and die, additionally if you had done 30 damage to the engine before you shot it down it will leak out and create an area around its body where the player can shoot and light a fire. If the player has done 50 damage to the wings before it took flight it will no longer be able to fly

Design Context: We needed a more serious enemy, the main grunts of sorts that looked and acted as enforcers of the antagonist's will. For this I chose the wasp as it has typical associations with aggression and are individually more dangerous than ants. To go with this visual personality I made them significantly more armed and clearly more competent in their fighting style, not hesitating and even flanking the player, presenting a true threat.

Drawn by fullychaoticdiss

Enemy Design: Beetle

Fighting Style:

-No ranged weapon
-Will rush the player, potentially breaking through cover
-Telegraphed swing moves that if they hit will knock the player back
-Can cover its own weakspots which it will do 50% of the time
-When it covers its weakspots the player can hit with a melee attack twice and stagger it leaving them open

Stats:

300 health
40 damage per hit

Weakspots:

Engine - Managing to deal 100 damage to the engine will light it on fire which will start dealing 10 damage per second until it dies

Design Context: To round up the enemies the player would encounter in our games, I needed an enemy personalised in its ability to be an enormous threat on its own, something to draw attention to itself just from appearing. For this I used a beetle as they are known to be the tanks of the insect world and would thus fit my need. I made them stat wise by far the strongest, having 3 times the health of the player and will be the only enemy type that interacts with the level by barging through any sort of cover the player relies on, which combined with the earlier mentioned stats makes for a very intimidating miniboss almost.

Drawn by fullychaoticdiss

Ability Design: Tinker

Basic Detective Function: Can be used to pick locks to reach inaccessible areas or open containers

Basic Combat Function: Can be used to set barrels or containers or whatever item we think of to explode after a certain amount of time from the tinkering being finished, will require the player to reposition quickly and draw enemies in if they want the full use. Additional uses include a potential self-repair that Dec can use on himself and shelves/other large objects that the player can knock down and create cover with.

Renewable Upgrade:

-Can now tinker with alarms and anything else that can create noise to draw people in, can potentially grab items that cause noise and place them in whatever spot they want and let it draw enemies in

-If Tinker is used in melee on a wasp enemy you can make them instantly fall and crash upon attempting to fly away, this could require a sneak attack on them which works well with the new noise traps. Can add in some invisible player cheats where the wasp will automatically crash into the nearest enemy upon entering the air.

-The player could leave around ammo traps for the basic ant grunts by sacrificing some of their own ammo, if an enemy ant finds the decoy ammo their gun will explode in their hands and leave them only with basic melee hits or we can make them just straight run away and leave the combat arena as a more merciful way of dealing with the common meatshields of the corpos

Pollution Upgrade:

-Can start up generators now that could automatically open usually harder-to-reach areas

-Does the same noise thing except the items set to make noise are also set to release smoke, leaving the enemies blinded for a second

-Explosions from tinkering with explosive objects now leave behind a fire that can start to damage enemies that walk over it

-Same ant ammo ability instead now though the pistol explodes and lights them on fire

-Same ability on the wasp except now you light it on fire as well so when it crashes it leaves a fire effect, additionally for some invisible player cheats we could make it crash into other enemies on purpose

-Can tinker on the beetle enemy if they are at or below 25% health, causing them to run uncontrollably into something, additionally, for some invisible player assistance we can make it so that if they are close enough to an explosive or another enemy they will automatically end up running into them

Potential Pollution Upgrade that needs discussion - Could make it so Dec can use fuel material from defeated enemies as weapons using tinker, basically grenades or Molotovs

Explanation of thought process with Tinker Ability: My thought process here is that Tinker is supposed to be the best way for the player to interact with the objects in the level. This means that there need to be lots of interactable objects on the field. Additionally, The design language I am aiming for is renewable = more difficult tactical gameplay as the player has fewer options that require lots of setup while the pollution is more of an open sandbox type of playstyle where you can really do anything in various destructive and almost brutal ways.

Drawn by Jeremy Koeleman

Ability Design: Melee

Basic Detective Function: Access to break through barricades by just bashing your way through

Basic Combat Function: It's a strong melee hit that will deal 50 damage

Renewable Upgrade:

-A new attack where if you hold your attack button you can knock one target into the other causing both to be knocked back and stunned, giving room for more tactical play

Pollution Upgrade:

-Can break through unreinforced doors even without a key

-Can imbue attacks with fire when holding the right mouse button adding an additional 20 damage to your hits

-Knockback attack now knocks them down as well which leaves them more open to followup attacks instead of being more of a window for traps or escape like the renewable version

-All melee hits now act as a swiping motion infront which can hit multiple enemies, this applies to the knockback attack which can send multiple enemies back in 1 hit, adding to the aggressiveness of the pollution playstyle

Explanation of thought process with Melee Ability: My ideas here was to keep this as a much simpler more straight forward way of interacting with the game. It's a melee brute force attack and when players read it and see it the applications of it will be pretty straight forward and intuitive, you see a barricade, go hit it and break through, you see a weak looking door, whack it a few times. Of course a majority of its uses will be however in the combat scenarios as it is basically your last resort when you are swarmed, but if played well can be a strong situational tool. The pollution path here is even more starkly aggressive as it's sweeping attacks truly let the player go into a potentially entirely different sort of playstyle than what they would usually do, allowing more for the sandbox element to be expressed. The renewable path meanwhile is basically a good and simple reposition tool for the enemy so you have a way to respond if you are swarmed in a tactical way, the simple knockback also allows for not just an ''Oh no I need to get this guy off me'' but a potential trap setup.