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Overgrowth game5/26/2023 ![]() The course culminates in an end-of- quarter open house to showcase our games. We will learn the fundamentals of games design via lecture and extensive reading in order to make effective games to explore issues facing society today. Run as a hands-on studio class, students will design and prototype games for social change and civic engagement. This project-based course provides an introduction to game design principals while applying them to games that teach. Over the last few years we have seen the rise of "serious games" to promote understanding of complex social and ecological challenges, and to create passion for solving them. Prerequisites: 147 or equivalent background. This class has multiple short projects, allowing us to cover a variety of genres, from narrative to pure strategy. We will make digital and paper games, do rapid iteration and run user research studies appropriate to game design. The focus of CS247g is an introduction to theory and practice of the design of games. This course takes place entirely in studios please plan on attending every studio to take this class. Studio based format with intensive coaching and iteration to prepare students for tackling real world design problems. These are all skills that I’ll take into future games for sure! I hope others enjoy Overgrowth as much as I did making it.Ī project-based course that builds on the introduction to design in CS147 by focusing on advanced methods and tools for research, prototyping, and user interface design. Fine tuning a systems game was much more difficult than I had expected, but I learned to enjoy the dynamic process. I’ve also learned a lot about gauging game balance and the different ways to adjust it. I’ve learned to be more confident in throwing huge ideas out there to see how they will play out. This project was all about making significant changes, testing well, and making big pivots as a result. It was a long road to finding the mechanics and balance needed to create an interesting challenge for players, and it was certainly satisfying to see players play so thoughtfully! In the end, it was exciting to see how players thought and strategized while playing the game. Towards our later playtests, we wanted to strongly emphasize the cooperative nature of the game, and so we made the change to allow players to decide the order of player turns each round. The scenarios could be caused by humans or from nature itself. Rather than having an actively changing forest (via some “forest” action, or something similar), we ended up having event cards that created scenarios similar to what would happen to a forest in real life. Those actions also had consequences that players were aware of as indicated by their total CO2 impact on the environment. building a factory, paving the way towards the win condition). building apartments, utilities) that built towards larger goals (e.g. We had mechanics that were interlocking in nature basic actions such as planting and chopping trees for lumber contributed towards bigger actions (e.g. The final game ended up focusing on challenge and fellowship, as players worked together to strategize and build their city. Thank you to Shana for being so passionate about our core inspiration and encouraging us to dig into external resources to better inform our design. ![]() My past games have mostly been on the fun and fantastical side, so designing Overgrowth as a more serious, educational game was very new. Personally, I think they are a dream team □ Their wealth of ideas, paired with everyone’s relative strengths, made for a constantly collaborative and exciting process. It’s certainly the most complex game I’ve worked on so far! I really have to thank my fellow group mates: Shana, Kyle, and Ji Hong. Overgrowth is priced at 27,99€ but comes with a 17% discount until January 2nd.Working on Overgrowth has been a thoroughly enjoyable process. You will be able to try out the features in the new alpha videos as soon as they are released.” After gaining 15 stacks (120 monsters or minions), you gain additional bonus health equal to 3.5 maximum health. “If you support us now, you will be able to try out the combat mechanics in the arena prototype, duel your friends on the same machine by hooking up two controllers, and use the integrated level editor to explore and modify a number of included environments. Overgrowth Edit Description Passive: Every 8 monsters or enemy minions that die near you permanently generates a stack. However, those who decide to purchase it will get access to its alpha version that feels more like a sandbox of technology and martial arts than a story-driven action-adventure.Īs David Rosen, the game’s main programmer, wrote on the game’s Steam page: Overgrowth has been in development for a couple of years and is still far from being completed. The next one in the long list of games supporting this Early Access program is Wolfire Games’ Overgrowth. It seems that more and more games opt for Steam’s early access program in order to be self-funded by their fans.
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