MSTU 6000 Final - Life of Fishball Man -

Play online: https://play.unity.com/mg/other/webgl-bhb

A mini-game helps players understand the relationship between plastic usage and ocean pollution, especially during pandemic time.

Need

Because of the need for self-protection, the usage of single-use plastic increased a lot during the pandemic. According to the EnvironmentWatch and DailyConversation.com, we as a planet are using almost 3.8 times more amount of plastic and polymers than our decade average. In the short span of three months since WHO's declaration of a global pandemic, an astonishing number of 24.7 billion masks were produced and, of course, disposed of.  Ocean plastic pollution is a problem that we should pay attention to. During this pandemic period, we should not let self-protection be an excuse for ignoring plastic pollution. By researching existing ocean pollution-related games, it is necessary to have a game that can show the relationship between human behaviors and ocean pollution problems and build players' empathy for water life. Players in elementary school and middle school can benefit from this game. 

MDA

In Life of Fishball Man, a background story about fishball man leads the players to connect human behavior in the daytime and fishes survival in the nighttime. 

In the daytime, players will use arrow keys to move around the apartment, use a space key and mouse click to interact with objects. There will be multiple options for players to choose from.  Many options ask players to choose between convenience( use less energy point and time ) and creating plastic wastes.

When players go sleep, the game will switch to the nighttime scene. The fish will inherit human food value from the daytime. Players will use arrow keys to move around the ocean, find food and avoid trash created in the daytime. The amount of trash ( difficulty of the night scene game) is decided by players' decisions in the daytime. If the fish successfully survived in the nighttime, the game will go back to the daytime scene and increase survival days. In this word, the game goes as a routine and evaluates players' scores by calculating the number of their survival days. 

Live as long as possible is the main goal when playing this game.

Whenever the human or fish runs out of energy or food, the game is over. Players need to find a balance between maintaining human life and fish life at the same time. In this way, players can relate their daily behaviors to the existing environmental pollution and understand that one's behavior influences the environment.

Challenge:

The main challenge in the design part is how to build empathy that can make players care about fishes' lives. A background story is the main solution for this challenge. 

Limitation:

Right now, the game's main functionalities are done. However, the survival days' number won't increase when players pass one round. Also, there are no goals in the daytime for players to complete to push them to stay in the daytime scene and have some actions. 

In the future, players will have tasks for them to finish in the daytime, so they will longer stay on the daytime scene. Besides, when players decide to watch TV, they can see news about the pandemic to understand how one's choice on PPE related to the pandemic worldwide can help them have a macroscopic view about pollution.