Type: Second Place, 2021-2022 LandDesign MatterLab Grant
Date: 2021.10 - 2022.3
Team Leader: Xue Gao
Team Member: Erqi Meng, Rui Tao, Zhouqian Guo
Technical Support: Zihao Pan
Responsibilities: Grant Application, Game Mechanics Design, UIUX Design, 3D Modeling, Technical Support Communication, Game Test Organization, Presentation, Animation
Tool: Blender, Adobe XD, Adobe After Effect, Unity
COtopia
COtopia is a multiplayer strategy community-building game to make the public engagement process more fun, intuitive and inclusive. It focuses on the interaction among the participants and aims to reflect on how their decisions impact the larger system.
Each participant will play a character in the community with their own special abilities and goals. Through discussing, cooperating, and competing, players will together distribute limited resources, develop the community, respond to triggered elements and events, and fulfill their goals. Designers could build their own site-specific COtopia with maps, roles, and conditions, and hold engagement events online or on-site.
•Entertainment
Attract people’s attention to landscape design, urban planning, and community-building
•Education
Helps players understand how a community runs as a system through interactions between elements and people; and how individuals' decisions could influence community development
•Community Engagement
A convenient tool to hold instant public engagement events
•Research
As an open-source platform, fill and expand the database of bottom-top decision-making.
Game Mechanics
Game Mechanics Diagram
Goal
CHARACTER
Each player will choose a character in COtopia to play at the start of the game. For each character, there will be a special skill, a list of achievements, and an ultimate winning goal.
We hope by playing a character in the game, people would gain an understanding of the needs and visions of different people in the community in the real life.
Handbook-Charactor Introduction
ELEMENTS
Each player will have action points to place elements on the map. Each element will increase or decrease the properties of COtopia.
To keep COtopia running healthily while going for their goals, players will need to communicate and use their action points and abilities wisely.
(Would love to learn more about the elements? Check ‘Element Design’ file for property design and ‘render folder to see how they look like!)
Handbook-Element Introduction
COMBINED ELEMENT
In COtopia, when certain elements are combined with other elements, new elements are born. To create this kind of combined element, players need to know what elements it must contain and what elements are optional, like a recipe.
We hope by introducing the concept of “combined elements”, players could gain an understanding of how “space” is formed in real-life environments.
(Check ‘Element Design’ file for more information about ‘combined elements’, ‘triggered elements’ and ‘Events’!)
Handbook-Combined Element Reciepts
PROPERTY
Each player will have action points to place elements on the map. Each element will increase or decrease the properties of COtopia.
To keep COtopia running healthily while going for their goals, players will need to communicate and use their action points and abilities wisely.
EVENT & TRIGGERED ELEMENT
When the properties of COtopia reach a certain threshold, things will be triggered. It could be an EVENT taking place for a few rounds or some resources like pollinators, wildlife, etc. that begin to appear in the community.
Some elements will produce triggered elements while others may consume them. We hope these mechanics will provide a picture of how real-life communities function in the cycle environmentally and socially.
ACHIEVEMENT
There are both community achievements and personal achievements in the game. Through the playing of discussion, players need to balance their pursuit for personal winning as well as the well-being of the COtopia community.
Handbook- Event and Property Dairy
Handbook- Triggered Element
Handbook- Achivement
Game Guidence
Game Instruction
UI/UX Design
User Flow Sketch
Main Game Session Prototype
Game End Session
Game Test
With the technical support of Zihao Pan, we are able to run a simple game test before our presentation. This first test will not focus on the visuals of the game but on the logic of the component and interaction among the players.
Click here to view the full record of the game test.
WHAT MAKES SENSE?
•Characters and their abilities
“Young People“, “Kid” use their abilities in the game test.
•Combined Element
There’s a general understanding of “playground” and players are able to build essential elements in the playground.
•Communication
Players collaborate with each other and build the road net.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE RETHOUGHT?
•Too much attention to individual achievements.
•Lack of money.
•Similar elements are built in the first several rounds.
•Not sure what elements bring what benefit.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
•Only show names of personal achievements. Add more mutual achievements for the community.
•Add more elements that can earn money.
•Give tips to suggest what to build at the start.
•Revise unlock conditions for some elements to give more diversity at the beginning.
•Refine element search bar and filter.
Game Test Record Cut
Game Test Process Visualization
Possible Next Steps
•More design thinking about the “DESIGNER TOOLKIT”
•More design thinking about how COtopia functions as an open-source database, how to present data collected from players actions.
•Start to develop in game engine three dimensionally. The next game test should be more visually convenient.
