The increase in natural disasters has been linked to the moods of three people, and it's up to you to romance them, help them control their emotions and learn about sustainability, and save the planet
With the worsening of climate change, we are seeing more and more natural disasters, around the world and in our own local communities, like the recent flooding and storms in Capitola. We decided to use video games as an expressive medium to promote a sustainable lifestyle while being charming and entertaining.
Green Hearts: A Sustainable Dating Sim is a dating simulator where you are tasked with romancing a natural disaster to help prevent further destruction and teaching the importance of living an environmentally-conscious lifestyle.
On the management end, we first delegated clear roles to each other and split tasks accordingly to make sure all our bases were covered. Throughout the process of building the game, we were diligent about checking in on each other to make sure that tasks were getting completed and that we were on track to finishing the game. On the programming end, we used Godot Engine, and developed a custom graph-based dialogue structure that let us express the many different twists and turns in the story.
All the drawn sprites, assets, and mini-game backgrounds were created by us. The sprites and some of the assets were designed and rendered in Medibang Paint Pro.
Drawing so many assets and high-quality sprites in a short amount of time was really difficult. Additionally, coming up with a theme and design for the overall look and gameplay was challenging and pushed my understanding and experience with the drawing software I was using. Another challenge was writing all the dialogue for this dialogue-heavy game.
First and foremost, we are incredibly proud of having written, implemented, designing, and rendering an entire playable game with 4+ unique endings and mini-games.
Amber: For all things related to design and asset creation, I was really proud of the quality of the sprites and the overall theme design of the game. It was time-consuming, but added a lot to the feel of our finished product.
Max: I am proud of the minigames that I designed and implemented, as they play crucial roles in the pacing, teaching about sustainability, and engagement in our story.
Sritha: I am proud of how I stepped up to become the Lead Writer of this project while being involved in the development of the game, despite having to learn the Godot Engine. For a very writing-heavy project, I am really proud of how much I was able to write in just one day, while converting it all into the Dialogue Graph in GDScript.
We would like to polish the existing storylines and dialogue, develop more characters and their respective stories, implement more minigames of higher difficulty, and potentially publishing and marketing this game to spread our message about sustainability and the effects of climate change on natural disasters.