Unity
Team
8 Weeks
Contributions
Gameplay
UI
Misc
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Op is Op is a game for children, meant to educate about the importance of efficiently managing and storing energy. The player generates and consumes energy to take care of an adorable endangered species of rabbit.
The pet requires food, warmth and entertainment in the form of playing with it. The goal of the pet was to create an emotional bond with the kids so that they may be invested in the global environmental issues the team was trying to convey.
The game was developed for the Oyfo Museum in Hengelo, the Netherlands, and as such is only available in Dutch.
Gameplay
I worked over a portion of gameplay, including interact-ables, the game’s rules and the day-night cycle.
I created several interact-able objects, with which you generate or transform our resource (electrical energy):
- Solar Panel – generates energy;
- Farm – using energy, produces food;
- Garden – using energy, actively reduces pollution.
I implemented and tweaked several of the game rules, including winning and losing, interacting with time, upgrades, checkpoints, and the score.
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Day-Night Cycle & Storms
The Day-Night Cycle was a core feature, dictating when the Pet would need food, sleep, or entertainment, and fuelling or controlling other crucial gameplay elements such as the Solar Panel and Farm. For added dificulty, I also developed a random but deterministic sandstorm system which would also limit the available limit the solar energy you could use during the day.
It features a semi-realistic clock system, which you can use to trigger events at certain hours of the day; and a way to tweak the skybox & lighting to achieve believable results of the day & night.
User Interface
Collaborating with the UI designer, I implemented and helped design a responsive user interface, geared towards children for touch screens. We placed a lot of emphasis on the interface for two reasons: to attract the children’s attention and because this was our main method of player input.
Touch Screen & Miscellaneous Features
Due to limited time, we opted to use a 3rd party plugin called TouchScript to easily enable the use of custom gestures and per-object touch interaction for our game.
I worked on miscellaneous features such as a highscore system per player and a questionnaire at the end of the game to measure how much the players educated themselves about the environment. The highscores are saved locally on the machine using unencrypted JSON.
