Net Carbon

An educational arcade-style platformer in collaboration with SSE Thermal.

Play the game jam prototype here: https://harrypetch.itch.io/net-carbon

Project Summary

Net Carbon was originally created for a game jam with Abertay University in only 5 days. The game jam was in partnership with SSE Thermal, who wanted to create a video game to educate the public about their contributions towards Net Zero.

Net Carbon was chosen as the winning entry to the jam, and we were commissioned to develop the game further over 6 weeks. The final version is not available publically, but, the original jam prototype is available on itch.io and you can watch the gameplay video for the original prototype to the right.

My primary role on this project was as an artist, but I also worked on design (mostly concepting and UI Design). You can read more about this below.

This project went on to be exhibited at the COP26 Expo in Glasgow in 2021 and was showcased by BAFTA to The Duke of Cambridge in 2022.

Concepting

At the start of the game jam, we were given two vital pieces of information in the brief. These were:

The game must educate players on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
The game is planned to be exhibited at SSE Thermals expo booth at COP26.

From this, I extracted the following requirements for the game:

The full time of gameplay must be short (no more than 5 minutes) to reduce crowding at the booth.
And, the game must also engage with viewers, not just the player.

These requirements were the driving force behind our concept - taking inspiration from Among us and Wreck-It-Ralph, to create a snappy arcade-style experience.

Art Refresh and Level Design

The bulk of my work to develop our prototype involved giving the game an entire art refresh and creating all new assets. The game had 2 main areas; the Apartment, and the Factory. In recreating the art for these, I also took the opportunity to put some more thought into the level design, and being much more intentional with my choices of asset placement.

The Factory

The images to the right show the process from the prototype to final design.

The prototype originally had a vertical level which involved a lot of climbing across multiple screen lengths, whilst the new design was more horizontal and fit mostly on one screen.

The new design also had much more consideration for realism and the minigames - each number on the Development Sketch corresponds to a minigame and its location.

Finally, the art was updated to also include SSE Thermal colours and logos, and to have more visual interest.

The Apartment

The images to the right show the process from the prototype to final design.

The prototype originally used a loft-style apartment and took up most of the screen size, whilst the new design was much more rectangular and left room at the top and bottom of the screen for UI elements.

The new design was also much easier to navigate, taking inspiration from shotgun apartments to ensure all the rooms flow as one big space.

Finally, the art style was updated to incorporate some of the colours from the factory, and it was given a much more modern design.

Minigames and UI Design

Alongside the art refresh, the entire UI of the game was to be redesigned. The bulk of this UI Design was for the minigames, as it was vital these were easy to quickly understand, representative of the real process, and that they all had a consistent design.

Temperature Match

The images to the left show the process from the prototype to final design.

The original prototype was implemented using basic shapes and colours to prioritise usability over aesthetics due to our limited timeframe.

The development sketch showed a much more interactive design, with assets representing the actual factory component that the player is maintaining.

Upon the first implementation of this design, we noticed a few issues with the layout of the buttons and text, so altered the positions of these to allow for better usability, as seen in the final design image.

Transportation

The images to the left show the process from the prototype to final design.

The original prototype was implemented using basic shapes and colours to prioritise usability over aesthetics due to our limited timeframe.

The development sketch focused more on how we could represent this minigame in a way that aides the players understanding of the CCS process, by taking the prototype minigame and placing this on a "map" of sorts, showing the route underground.

A few further changes were made to the design for the final implementation, but for the most part, the interactions stayed very similar to the original prototype, with the bulk of changes here being aesthetically driven.

Sorting

The images to the left show the process from the prototype to final design.

The original prototype was implemented using basic shapes and colours to prioritise usability over aesthetics due to our limited timeframe.

We felt this prototype was already pretty simplified and easy for players to understand, so we didn't want to change it too much. Again, most of the changes here were aesthetically driven.

We added labels to the bottom of each section to aid understanding, alongside adding faint images in the background for the same reason. We also changed the colouring to red/blue to distance from the good/bad associations seen with green/red.

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