Hi,

I’m Dori and I’m doing this project as part of the completion of Creative Technologies course at Torrens University.

Endring is a game fostering change just as it’s title suggests as well – the word ’endring’ in Norwegian means ’change’.  As you can see I’m interested in the ’games for change’ concept and I’m quite a green-nature nerd :).

The original vision for the game was: to enable people to help a tree grow and gain its natural wellbeing back. By this, showing the importance of a harmonious relationship of nature and humans, enabling players to be the change by involving them in the gameplay and showing them the changes they are able to make on a tree as they gradually restore its natural habitat and health.

It shows what issues industrialisation & urbanization cause on nature and passively calls to action that a single living being can do so much. Just as one tree can provide so much life.

This project so far has seen a lot of ideation and change of direction before finally settling for the design and art style.

This is a one person project with some programming help, so I also had to make some decisions to realisticly plan and develop within the timeframe available.

Initially, I planned to have a 3D game. Then, I realised that this puzzle game’s mechanics are very much 2D-based. So, I thought: let’s challenge myself still and do a 2D-3D hybrid... of course... accessible and realistic in case you love 3D and you’re excelling in it. Yes.. not me :). My relationship with 3D so far has had a lot of ups and downs... with more downs than ups. :)

This way, I ended up doing a 2D game. Incorporating classical arts and crafts into digital has always excited me. I had some past uni projects when I was naturally drawn to paint brush and pencil. I always feel that elevating classical arts and enhancing it with the digital is such an interesting process and the result is always surprising and different than pure digital. I feel that real tactile arts are less and less important as we live in this digital age. So, this project is also in honor to our beloved paint brushes and watercolour papers sitting on a dusty shelf... (maybe not??)

Endring’s protoype and vertical slice looked like this:

For the protoype, I mainly focused on getting the mechanics right and only showing the direction of the art style and explanation of the story.

From this concept, I started re-designing the assets and started my creative painting process.

These are some assets I got down to paint:

So, how did I end up doing a physics-based puzzle game? As a prototype I was thinking of something easy yet fun. Many small games that are a success are usually very simple yet unique and enjoyable, like Flappy Bird. They introduce a new perspective into something very simple and the result is a lot of fun.

My ideation started with some music-based game, where there’d be some bumpers on the scene that would have a music note each. Buy hitting them the right order, you’ll end up with a small nice melody. I still like this game idea, but I got some further thinking as I really wanted to create something that fosters change in a way. I started to think about game ideas from a different perspective. What if I started to think about themes and stories that are important to me. Since I always loved natural elements, nature as a theme and environmental consciousness and I always adored the wisdom of trees, then I came up with the story of needing to feed or cure a tree. Taking the original bumper-based puzzle game idea into this one, this physics based game idea was born.

Weekly build available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RG4mUnprHf6A_GDiSCJNd8B_dJzFD3pL/view?usp=sharing