Climate Warriors

Inspiration

This project was inspired by the current issues revolving around the Earth’s climate, as well as creating a program that engages in advocacy for climate change. We all wanted to creatively incorporate the theme retro game of Uncommon Hacks 2025 into our project as well, so we decided to go for a retro game vibe. Our project covers four different natural elements (air, fire, water, and earth) and how human impact is affecting each of the environments. We all felt that by incorporating the climate change problems from air pollution, deforestation and dehabitation and forest fires, water pollution and overfishing, and finally, oil drilling and land pollution from over-mining, we would be hitting issues that are in dire need of change. As students who are passionate about environmental science and environmental well-being, this topic is extremely important to us and relevant in especially today’s world. Sustainability is a topic that we are all enthusiastic about, and this project encapsulates our enthusiasm in learning more and sharing that knowledge with others so that we are able to raise awareness and hopefully encourage sustainability and reduce the harmful impacts of human activity on the environment.

What it does

Our game encourages the user to help save planet Earth! In recent years, pollution on Earth in all factors has been increasing tremendously, and enough hasn’t been done to mitigate and prevent the soon permanent damages caused by human influence. Our game allows the user to pick different locations on the Earth and combat the climate issue regarding that element, in hopes that the user gains more insight about the issues that Earth is facing caused by the influx of human activity causing habitat loss, pollution, and environmental degradation. The user can defeat these enemies, unique to each natural element, by moving around and hitting them with elemental orbs. The controls for playing the game are the arrow keys/WASD to move and left-click to shoot orbs. Each of the warriors have different base stats to differentiate between them: fire is just default, water has better jumping power, air has better base speed, and earth has more health.

How we built it

We primarily used Unity to create the game functionality and coded in C# through VS Code. We collaborated using Unity’s Cloud and version control in order to share our code with each other through a repository. Using the game engine, we made multiple scenes for levels and implemented sprites, background music, and player control to each of the levels we planned out. We also made our own assets using Procreate and Ibis Paint X, as well as adding sound in for the background music. Some of the media included in this project, such as the background music and pixel platformer sprites were not made by us and were found online.

Challenges we ran into

There were many challenges that we as a group ran into because although we had knowledge with C++, it was some of our first time coding in C# and in Unity, so we had to technologically improvise and quickly adapt to the issues we were facing by communicating with one another and researching the bugs we faced. Another major hurdle was working with a game engine that none of the team was super familiar with; we had major issues working with Unity and version control in order to collaborate; Unity’s cloud and version control is different from GitHub’s and it was an obstacle we had to figure out without prior knowledge about the game engine. We overcame this hurdle just by reading through forums and trying to figure out how we can make a repository so everyone is able to work on the project. Another one of the issues we had was with getting sound and background music in after the user made a move launching their orb, which was an issue because of the lack of exposure some of our group had with C#; although not being able to implement perfectly, we were able to add a background music to our project and learned from our mistakes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our theme, game design and environmental engineering because although there were amazing tracks, it was hard for us to decide on a certain idea that was both creative and useful, while also incorporating the theme in a valuable way. We are also proud of our perseverance with trying something new as we all had different experiences, but managed to work together in the end. As we all did not have a lot of experience with game design or Unity, we are proud to develop a project that we are all excited about and one that furthers our own interests in environmental well-being and sharing that passion with others. We are proud of our accomplishments throughout this journey of game development and hope to improve and expand further upon this project in the upcoming future.

What we learned

We learned a lot about using Unity and its version control system. A huge part of our process was getting to know more about the game engine, how each component and object is incorporated into the game, and how to collaborate with each other using version control. Getting used to the different game objects and their attributes was challenging and learning to integrate multiple aspects of game design was something that was new and fun for us. We learned a lot about game design in general and how much work is put into creating good games through this project.

What's next for Climate Warriors

Next up, we plan on polishing up sprites and adding animations to each of them; we can definitely lean more into the warriors aspect of the idea and make the sprites and characters more coherent. We also plan on creating our own sprites for the platforms and making our own background music so that we are not relying on other creative medias for them. A lot of what we have done so far is a very basic sketch and there is much to improve upon. We definitely plan on adding more levels and bosses for the player to fight, as well as implementing more abilities for each of our different elemental warriors, such as different base stats and special moves. The idea is that we can have power-ups scattered around the map for the warriors to fuel up with special abilities. Currently, we have different base stats for each of our warriors: fire is just default, water has better jumping power, air has better base speed, and earth has more health; however we want to implement the base stats further. Fire can have a higher base attack damage, which we could not implement, with a special mass attack against enemies; water can have a special heal move ability; air should have a special ability of a tornado wiping out the enemies; earth with a special ability of a quick immunity shield to protect it from enemies. The enemies can also get a bit more work, adding more variety into their moves set and polishing up sprites and animations, or adding a variety of different types of environmental foes describing ethical and environmental issues, such as environmental degradation because of tech, or issues of urbanization and habitat loss. We also are looking into implementing an online multiplayer version where a whole party of players of different elemental warriors can team up to fight against a boss or clear levels together.