Under the Lake

With past successful action in our city against corporate interests that were to affect water quality, we wish to revitalize said efforts alongside upcoming youth with a videogame about the future.

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Inspiration

The City that Captured the Sun That is the name of our hometown, with a rich history between the chinese, the americans and italians, Mexicali is a border city between Mexico and the United States. Our city is renowned not for the landmarks, or its malls, but by its people with warmer hearts than the heat we face on a daily basis. But the weather is getting stronger by the year and we had our hottest year yet in 2022, then in 2023, 2024 and finally today. With resources like water waining with the Colorado River being drained to the point it cannot hold the waves in the sea.

But Community Action has been in the blood of our country every since the Independence and Revolution, and it is still the same with the successful pushback of Constellation brands from 2015 to 2020, a company that looked to extract the already diminished water of our river. Inspired by this event we wish to push education and empathy to the minds of our youth and encourage them to pursue the change that we need for our city and later our country. By talking with Sonoran Institute, an NGO that works to preserve wildlife and the wetland along the Colorado River in both countries, we have seen the response to be an interest in the use of technology to give important connections to students with the world that surrounds them. So, the answer is a narrative-driven game about the hardships of a life with not enough resources to pass around and the dangers it entails that could happen a few years down the line.

What it does

A game about empathy Our game idea provides a vision into a world where said changes were not made and the consequences of a lack of initiative. We want people to connect with it beyond a pure fact to an emotional feeling that as long as it resonates with one student is enough to push the needle of progress.

A gripping Narraitve The best way to evoke emotional responses and argue a compelling call for action is with well-developed narratives that showcase the hardships of a possible life that players can feel the need to do the right thing. It is a game about hard decisions were everyone cannot be satisfied and you will constantly face new problems that adapt to the environment.

Day to Day decisions The best way to offer the sense of a real world is give realistic situations about a world where everything is starting dwindle and the emotional stress it ensues. The mechanics are simple but offer moral and logical based intuition about what's best for you and others wellbeing.

How we built it

A new alternative to development Using one of the newer engines Godot we have made a demo showcasing the general idea of the game with (some) original spritework. For the spritework we used Aseprite to make compelling visuals that provide and interesting look to the game. For the logic we used the in-house language of Godot which is gdscript. We also used iMovie to showcase the idea!

Challenges we ran into

A new area of learning Godot is a very interesting engine but comes with new struggles as it is a coding environment we've never touched before alongside Aseprite as the tool we used to make as many assets as we could came with new understanding of a drawing tool based around pixelart. Also making the groundwork logistics to get the game published meant talking with local institutions such as our school with the help of our college's head of computer science career and with wetland conservation group known as Sonoran Institute to emphasize the theme of water in our game.

Gaps in our work We understand that making the game is one thing, but getting it off the ground in use is the next part and there is a lack of complete preparation of the steps for example a plan B in case we do not get the immediate support of our school or a lack of interest for software applications in school curriculum. All in all, the lack of a logistics student is shown in the project although further logistics and data support can be acquired with students of the business department down the line.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the green light from our teacher and an interest from Sonoran Institute's head of education branch gives us a lot of strength with the future of the project to gain a standing as a tool for teaching at different possible age groups in the future. Also coordinating the programming, art creation and documentation meant strengthening our team's ability to communicate and organize to plan ahead the hours of the event and gives us a good leeway into long-term planning and development. All four of us are interested in different areas of relevant development such as art design, programming and project management so we all found good spots to work in while helping each other out when need be!

What we learned

We learned a lot about making compelling narrative-driven games and how to approach sensitive topics about the life that is currently happening near our city and in other parts of the country. Also how to plan a project like this and see ahead into the various questions that come beyond the crafting of the game and instead goes into publishing, financing and sustain it. The fact that the project was able to be separated into various small components and roles meant we could work individually and later connect the dots to allow a project as big as this be plausible.

What's next for Under the Lake

In the future there are various plans to acommodate different age groups alongside the help of educative organizations to offer different teachings from the game based around the curriuculum of said groups. Once we are able to finish a basic product with the testing of our school we look to finance it in the long haul with a variety of institutions to get it backed. The timeline is made in various small steps to be completed that goes with the DevOps idea to constantly update and adapt the game to necessities presented by institutions; We will go from development to publishing and organizing into updates making a feedback loop of work.

The team looks into working with feedback generated from all areas of the community, from the folk who live outside the city and also those who are living through these droughts to give a voice to the struggles they are going through. With the help of professional educators such as our head of Computer Science at our school and workers from Sonoran Institute, the development of the game will go hand in hand with fact-based retrospectives and boots on the ground organizers. We also look forward that with momentum gained we could collaborate with similar groups or projects related to educational videogames in other parts of the world to give cohesion to influence outside the country. The growth goes from realistic steps from our school, to the local, then the state, next our country and finally into the globe.

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