Game Title
ShAVE The Future

Developer Name
CapOtt

Short Promo Blurb
“ShAVE the Future” is an educational game created for the Indiecade Climate Game Jam 2024 under the prompt "Change The Story". The game focuses on the potential solution of oil spills with hair, an eco-friendly solution developed by the non-profit organization Matter Of Trust.

Full Description
“ShAVE the Future” is an educational game created for the Indiecade Climate Game Jam 2024 under the prompt "Change The Story". The game focuses on the potential solution of oil spills with hair, an eco-friendly solution developed by the non-profit organization Matter Of Trust. In our game, the player’s goal is to convince citizens to donate their hair to soak up petroleum leaks in a mini stylized simulation of a society.

Promo Image(s)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13NfgY3YJLbkT886puBUFFN6CjUKD2El7?usp=drive_link

Promo Video
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13q5bYJRFf_how5LGIYXHN646VaQEIwMQ/view?usp=drive_link

Artistic Statement / Use of Theme(s)
Our game “ShAVE the Future” was created for the Indiecade Climate Game Jam 2024 under the prompt "Change The Story". The game focuses on the potential solution of oil spills with hair, an eco-friendly solution developed by the non-profit organization Matter Of Trust. In our game, the player’s goal is to convince citizens to donate their hair to soak up petroleum leaks in a mini stylized simulation of a society. We aim to have our player understand through this quick experience how promoting climate change actions can often start small and face numerous difficulties, but with enough time and effort, we can all change the story.

Development Summary
The most memorable part of our team’s development journey was the ideation, since we
spent a considerable amount of time brainstorming with the theme “change the story” in mind. More than 7 hours of that sprint were dedicated to solely meeting and discussions, as we kept scratching our previous ideas, even near the end of the ideation week. Our ideation process started with a news article on soaking petroleum leaks with hair, and ended with one too. Nevertheless, there were many explorations on the genre of the game and the theme between these two ideas, such as a game about finding and replacing words in NPCs’ dialogue, playing as a renewable energy source finding jobs currently occupied by petroleum, an top-down airship game, stealth, turret defense, and a masked protagonist fixing petroleum leaks but with a reset every 60 seconds, etc. We are convinced that the hardest thing to cut was the concept before our final decision with the masked man and time restraint concept, as we loved its core mechanic around time and have already started designing the art for it, yet the scope seemed to be too large and the setting a bit too “gloom and doom”.
Being a team with two members both more familiar with art rather than engineering, there were definitely many difficulties in regards to the workload and having to learn a lot of new knowledge as the jam unfolds. However, this was a challenge we have set ourselves up and are proud to say that we have overcome it. We also discovered many surprises which largely includes the advantages of having such a small team with familiar members, as the production schedule became a lot more flexible, the communication was constant and smooth, and the disagreements were solved efficiently.

Release Plan
Currently, we do not have any plans on continuing working on our game, as we planned
to keep it short, simple, and dedicated to this Climate Jam over the summer. We will likely fix some major bugs when discovered, and improve the game audio if we can meet collaborators that are willing to help. If we had a longer period of time to work on this project, we would definitely include other user interfaces such as a pause screen, a polished victory and defeat screen, and even adding a timed and scoring system for a tighter game flow. As for now, we plan on keeping only this project released on itch.io.