Artistic Statement / Use of Theme
Our project incorporates the themes through our mechanics since you create towers by planting a seed in game. The call to action is to inform and showcase how greedy and evil politicians / fossil fuel enthusiast / corporations are and how by taking a stance against them to defend nature, it will help nature heal and combat a lot of the human-made environmental damages. We really wanted to showcase 3 main points --

1. Humans are the cause of a lot of the environmental problems on Earth; especially due to the greed that's warranted under capitalism and is protected by the politicians, lobbyist, and corporations that benefit from it.
2. Earth can be destroyed extremely quickly but is rebuilt very slowly.
3. Even though humans are to blame for most of the environmental impact on Earth, humans are also responsible for helping restore and rebuild anything damaged. Earth will restore and rebuild a lot faster if humans make changes and take a stance towards protecting their home. A lot of inspiration came from the everyday greed of politicians/political parties and the biggest corporations of oil industry. (Exxon Mobil, BP Global, etc).

Development Summary
The original idea was way too out of scope for us -- we wanted to have multiple enemies from multiple factions (ie. Politicians, AI and Tech companies, fossil fuel companies, etc), a river mechanic that would drain and restore/support tower unit, several different pathways, and much, much more.

The biggest surprises for us were how tricky trying to use Github was and a lot of the difficulties with the programming. Unfortunately, none of us really knew how to use Github, so a good chunk of time was used to address technical issues (merging wasn't working correctly, the programming mechanics we were unable to fix and get in). We had lots of problems with creating a secondary path / a damage over time mechanic / letting the user sell their tower, so we had to cut all those mechanics due to lack of time and knowledge on how to implement them. The removing of the sell tower function was the hardest thing to cut since it felt really bad as a player to make a mistake and misplace a tower and not being able to change that, but we couldn't figure it out. With all of these complications, we unfortunately were not able to meet the climate messaging targets we wanted, and opted instead to just create an enjoyable experience given our current skill level.

Our team was split into 3 roles. Ryan was our artist and game balancer, making all of our art from stratch; Joel was the composer, sound designer supporting programmer, and creator of the intro sequence; Robert was the lead programmer, having programmed the entire game and was in charge of implementation and bug fixing. Game design was a collaborative effort.

(optional) Further Development Plan
We discussed making more levels, impliementing more call to action messaging, and experimenting with different themes that aren't just on Earth -- such as taking a more sci-fi approach, visually.

Topic Tags
Seed, Plant Towers, Humans vs Nature, Growth, Human-induced Climate Change, Fossil Fuel, Earth Destruction

Sprint Participation
Yes we did!

Game Engine, Platform, Format
Unity

Generative AI Disclosure
No

(optional) Promotional Video
None

(Optional) Feedback Form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IKxAvurYzA9LEV_L2qfbPJ_d0yCDC9JlouU9S7LElHg/edit