Bring Back The Beach

Play it on itch.io!

Project Description

Bring Back The Beach is a short puzzle game about beach cleanup & wildlife conservation. Based on goal 14 of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

Made in Twine for GAME17083 - Game Design 2: Play Design.

Process Work

Project Planning

Documentation

The final documentation for this project can be found here:

Bring Back the Beach - Twine Document

Selecting a goal

Relevance & Personal Connection

The design challenge that inspired Bring Back The Beach asked for a puzzle game, made in Twine, and based on one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

I selected goal 14 (conserve & sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development) because of its relevance.

In recent years, awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has increased; a prime example of pollution's impact. Movements such as Team Seas, which try to tackle ocean pollution, have also risen.

I also had a personal connection with having lived in a lakeside town for many years. I wanted to use my knowledge of marine life from that experience to craft a game that could be used as an educational tool for people in that town and others.

Identifying the problem

Narrowing Focus & Audience Consideration

Once I had selected one of the UN SDGs and a goal for the project, I went about defining the specific problem I wanted to address. I broke it down and ended up settling on beach conservation.

Brainstorming

Concepts, Puzzles, & Solutions

From there, I went about brainstorming ideas for gameplay and puzzles. The player would take on the role of an artist who formerly lived near the beach. It would be difficult to clean up the beach by themself and so they would need to get community members involved.

Pseudocode

Variable Management

Before I started programming in Twine, I wrote a list of every required variable so I could quickly reference them.

Flowcharts & Programming

Working In Twine

Bring Back The Beach was programmed in Twine and arranged in the form of branching nodes. Keeping a clean overview of the game's paths was crucial with so many different outcomes.

Puzzle & UI/UX Design

Hints & Colour Coding

To assist players, I colour coded clues, keywords, and interactable text.

Clues were highlighted in bright yellow to grab players' attention if they skimmed through the text.

Information related to time and special events was highlighted in red. This hue is attention grabbing but slightly less vibrant. The intention was to indicate future importance but not immediate relevance.

I highlighted interactable text in cyan. Light blue is typically used for links. Cyan was specifically chosen to separate text from the background.

Puzzle - Gathering Help

This puzzle was intended to teach players that beach conservation is easier when you have help.

It may seem difficult to convince others to assist but conservation is relevant to everyone in one way or another. It's just a matter of finding that personal connection!

Puzzle - Weather

The second puzzle spanned the entire in-game week. Players would need to form a plan for which parts of the cleanup effort they were going to address first.

Like in real life, cleanup efforts should be carefully planned according to the weather to ensure that measures are effective.

Puzzle - Cleanup

The cleanup puzzles are intended to teach players proper methods of beach cleanup. A lack of preparedness can be dangerous or worsen existing environmental conditions. People involved in cleanup efforts should have proper training and equipment beforehand.

Challenges

Variable Management

Bring Back The Beach was programmed entirely in Twine. Twine benefits from being easy to learn but it's difficult to keep track of global variables and remember their names when scripts are contained solely within nodes.

Writing out my variables in Miro helped to mitigate this.

Typos

Despite being well suited for narrative games, Twine has no spellchecking features. Rigorous playtesting was necessary for finding typos in text and variables.

Playtesting Paths

Bring Back The Beach has several endings based on the number of puzzles successfully completed and which ones. Testing the specific conditions required for each ending was time consuming and difficult to track.

Takeaways

Twine

This was my first time using Twine to make a game. It's a fantastic tool for narrative games being easy to learn and use. I wouldn't consider the project saving system user friendly or dependable but progress is saved frequently.

Playtesting

As I've come to learn through work on other projects, always make a plan for playtesting. I would have had more confidence in finding bugs or typos had I created a spreadsheet or flowchart tracking each condition before testing.

Puzzles

The full context for a puzzle should be available within its space. My puzzles may have been more effective had I shown players the weather forecast before asking them to gather help.

However, when a puzzle is designed effectively, it can be used to teach players valuable real world lessons.

Developed @ Sheridan College - 2022

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