CarbonBusters

Game Overview:

Carbon Busters is a 3D City Reconstruction Sim, created to spread awareness about the negative effects of car-centric cities on Climate Change. The player can reform the city by adding sidewalks, bike lanes, and green spaces, while balancing support and emissions.

Engine: Godot

Platform: Windows/PC

Team size: 12

Tools used: Godot, Blender, Photoshop, Google Sheets

Role: Lead Designer, lighting designer, value chart design

Itch.io: Download and play our latest version!

My contributions to the team:

Lead Game Designer in charge of communicating between programmers, sound designers, artists, and UI designers to keep a consistent theme and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Delegated tasks to team members and conducted weekly design team meetings to check in on progress.
Worked with the art team to implement assets into Godot Engine and ensure animations worked properly.
Helped design mechanics, create a value chart with formulas using Google Sheets, and animated the teaser trailer.
Designed lighting in Godot for the day and night cycle and animated emission material on building assets to follow.
Implemented Level Designs into Godot using the level editor made by our programming team.

Gameplay and Features

Replace roads with bikes, and sidewalks, along with adding lamps for better citizen support
Building costs "support" from the citizens, incomplete paths will also take away from citizens' happiness
Building greenery and bike racks will brighten up the world and encourage citizens to travel outside by walking or biking.
Day/Night cycle and a clock to indicate the years passing by, we use real data and values to calculate the rate of emissions that will increase over time. Once you go past the point of no return... you lose.
Cars, Citizens, and Bikers walk around during the game.

Process

The Goal: Creating a reimagined City-Sim

Our sim takes a more simplified yet unique version of a city you usually see in sim games.

We added parking lots in our game to make it as accurate as possible to concrete jungles.
We want players to be encouraged by the positive effect that greener spaces, walkable areas, and better public transit have on climate change.
Our programming team works with real climate data we researched to calculate a "point of no return" game end.

Prototyping and Concepting

Initially, we wanted to base our game around designing transit, but given the limited scope of the project, we decided to start small with improvements such as sidewalks, bike lanes, green spaces, bike racks, and lamps.

I created these images to help visualize the concept of our game and iterated it based on conversations with the design team. The main goals we wanted to complete for the Jam would be:

Design a sense of urgency
Create a resource system
Build infrastructure upgrades

As for the look and feel of the game, we wanted our assets to be simple and toon-y to give players the impression our game will be calm.

Simulation Design

I create a chart for our programmers to use as starting values for our upgrades and tick system. We are continuously playtesting as we add more components. Our goal is to reflect real-world emission rates as accurately as possible. As it was my first time working with a simulation game, I had to spend a lot of time researching (and am still doing so). It's very complicated... but that's the fun part!

Copy of Values Chart for happiness and emissions

Designing Simple and Smooth Lighting

Godot has an excellent animation system, where almost anything can be made into a keyframe. This was incredibly helpful as I was able to create a gradient sky shader that allowed me to keyframe night and day transitions.

Since our models were colored by material, I added emissions to the window materials, to align with the day/night cycle. The sun was also easy to animate, as I only needed to keyframe and loop its rotation.

Building the City

After working together to design our showcase-level layout, we finally put it to the test. Our programmers designed a level editor that we used to build the planned level.

Since it is a tile-based game, it was fairly simple to design and implement our vision. Here is an example of one of our draft designs and the process of building the level in Godot.

Implementing and Configuring Art Assets

I transfered over the art assets into Godot and configured their animations. I worked with Godots keyframing and looping systems to ensure everything looked great!

Next Steps:

The team still plans on working on the game together. At the moment, we are waiting for IndieCade for the Climate Jam results and for the potential to be included as a Steam release in a Climate Jam bundle. It has been a blast working on CarbonBusters, so please look forward to our updates in the future!

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