Endemic World

Made with Unity Engine for Windows PC (I do not own any of the art assets used in the game)

Overview

Endemic World is a world simulator that is done during our systemic design module where we had to combine a minimum of 2 systems to work together. We designed a total of 4 systems which are the Day & Night Cycle, Rainfall & Evaporation, Nature, and Wildlife to provide a realistic experience of a world simulation.

The progression model of the simulation was novelty with variable intervals of reward where the player gets visual feedback on their performance.

Day & Night Cycle

Affects growth of crops differently as they grow faster at night due to lesser sunlight which reduces water loss in the trees.
Reduces temperature of the overall environment during the night and increases it during the day, if the overall temperature is not optimal for the crop to grow, the health of the crop decreases.

Wildlife

Depends on fruits from trees to fill its hunger.
Depends on river bodies to quench their thirst, if the river body is small, they have to travel further for the water source.

Nature

Crops are planted to bear fruits and their health are affected by sunlight, temperature, and water.
The quality of fruits bore by the crop is dependent on the health of the crop.
The crops will die off if their health falls below 0.
Fruits will rot if left uneaten for too long.

Rainfall & Evaporation

Affects growth of crops as having too much or too little water will also reduce the health of the crop.
Wildlife tend to seek shelter during rainfall and seek for food/water when it is not raining.
Level of river bodies are affected by rainfall and evaporation.

Overall, the 4 systems work together to breathe life into an empty world and simulate the process of a world undergoing change and below are flowcharts showing the in-depth of how the systems work.

Endemic World was created in 9 weeks with 3 designers initially but 1 designer left after 5 weeks which required a re-scoping of the project.

Systemic flowchart

Design Process

Iteration 1

Endemic World initially started out as a project with an even wider scope where we planned for multiple biomes with a higher variety of animals with humans involved. Given the freedom to create whatever we wanted, we challenged our own limits by working towards a world creation simulation. It started with a terraforming concept where we wanted interaction between the player and the world they have created. We planned for 4 animals that consisted of 2 herbivores and 2 omnivores that could interact with humans and themselves.

Original scope planning of lifeforms interacting with environment

C.O.R.E system (Change On Realtime Events)

The C.O.R.E system was designed in mind that comprises of 4 main systems where plants and fruits would grow based on time and weather, wildlife consuming the crops to procreate or perish due to the lack of supply, carnivores preying on herbivores and humans preying on carnivores, and a weather system that would affect their decisions.

I wanted to give players the feeling of a creator where their action would be impact the world and have their results shown based on real-time changes occurring. Therefore, I researched on various plants and fruits growing in different climates and environment and how changes to these factors would impact their growth as I was in charge of the nature aspect to this system and the other designer to the wildlife aspect.

Forecaster system (Weather and Time)

The forecaster system was to designed to allow players to either sit back and watch as the world grows or interfere by manually changing climate and time. The AI within the world would then change their behavior pattern based on the climate and time changes in order to adapt to it.

The forecaster system was then designed with 2 modes of auto and manual. The auto mode would have time automatically progress and seasons would change after a set time has passed; the manual mode would allow changing of the time and seasons immediately. The manual mode is to give convenience to players so that they can see changes much quicker should they desire.

Roles & Responsibilities

Role: Systems Designer, Programmer

Being the only programmer after the 3rd member left, I breathed life into our world by:

Creating systemic designs of terraforming a world.
Coding the required systems.
Integrating UI assets into working menus.

Iteration 2

After the 3rd member left, we had to cut down on the dependency of multiple wildlife and humans due to the lack of manpower. Thus, we could only accomplish one of the herbivores in the system when I took over the development of wildlife as the interaction between crops and the forecaster system was already near completion. We then re-arranged the systems within C.O.R.E and split it up to what we have in the present, Day & Night Cycle, Weather & Evaporation, Wildlife, and Nature.

Day & Night System

The day & night system remained mostly untouched with only adding controls at the backend to determine how fast in real-time seconds a day passes in the world and how to determine what time of the day it is when my other teammate was doing skyboxes & lighting tweaks to fit the exact time of the day.

Weather & Evaporation System

The original multiple weather/environment was changed to only a single forest environment, thus, the weather that exists had been simplified to rain as we have decided that the interactions could still be achieved with a single type of climate change.

When adding in evaporation, what came across my mind was to increase realism as it ties in with the different possible intervals when rain occurs due to different rates of evaporation. The player could then be allowed to simulate from evergreen rain forests to dry rain forests which was one of our goals to make Endemic World a sandbox simulation.

Nature System

The nature system was designed to let players be able to create crops in the world, it features a point-and-click mechanic to create at the cursor. I have designed it this way to fit the style of perspective camera and with a white ring cursor to indicate where the crops can be created. This follows the style of most simulation game unit creation to follow the Law of Past Experience.

Each crop was designed with 3 primary stat of water, temperature, sunlight, and 1 secondary stat of health. Each of the primary stat is directly affected by the Day & Night and Weather & Evaporation system as mentioned previously. These primary stats then determines the health of the crop which affects the quality of the fruit bore.

Originally, we designed for each primary stat to affect a secondary stat but after several playtesting we felt that it was too overwhelming for the players as they had too many things to manage at once.

Wildlife System

The wildlife system had to be simplified but still keeping some of the interactions we originally wanted, thus, I re-designed the deer herbivore with the following behaviors:

Seek shelter when there is rain
Search for food/water when hungry/thirsty

Similar to the Nature system where crops have to be kept in a healthy state, deer that appears in the world also have to be kept alive but with a much simpler concept as they only need to be fed with food and water. Surprisingly, making the Wildlife system simpler brought about positive feedback from playtests as players were already busy managing the other 3 systems, although it was brought up that the carnivores would have been cool if there were added to the simulation since they feed on herbivores and would not require much management.

Post-Mortem

The project did not go as planned from our original scope, but we were still satisfied with the outcome and feel proud of attempting at such a scope of a project within 9 weeks. Even though each system might sound simple to implement, but when the integrating and creating meaningful interactions between all of them to deliver the experience of novelty for the player, the workload went up exponentially.

An additional lesson I have learnt from doing this project is to always account for members leaving the team with short notices and prepare contingency plans as I go along when working with any projects.

Ultimately, it was our first 3D project during DigiPen and we have challenged and pushed ourselves to the fullest to develop a sandbox simulation and learnt to appreciate the amount of hard work other developers have put into their game of similar genre. With that said, given the chance we would definitely take another shot at developing another sandbox simulation or game!

Thank you for reading about my work on Endemic World!

Lee Wei Liang

Systems Designer | Programmer