Introduction

Many strategy or building games exist on the market that have a nation or civilization aspect to them, where you maintain a country and expand its influence. Most of these are typically war-oriented or resource management games, or both. For example, Civilization is a series of games that involve exploiting the resources in your surroundings and conquering other nations.

Thus I set out to make a game about building a country but have its focus not be war. I tried to design a game that had more of a focus on the player’s relationship with the environment and also the player’s relationship with their own nation. This is to oppose the mindset that most games create: that the environment is simply something that exists to be exploited, and that the nation is something that only functions to serve the player. Through my game’s design that fosters environmental care, these ideas are challenged.

The result is Countryworks, a (relatively simple) environmentally oriented country builder.

Aesthetics

I wanted to have a pixelated isometric style similar to Habbo Hotel. It was also supposed to evoke Minecraft.

In the top left corner there is a country customizer where you can change the flag and country name. On the left bar is a list of all the different structures you can build, such as farms, towns, and roads. Below that is a list of all the Points you have, which are used for performing actions (such as building, destroying, farming, etc.)

In the top right corner are the 3 health bars: Environment, Country Satisfaction, and Food Supply. If any one of them drains to zero, the game ends.

The button on the bottom right is used to go to the Next Day, which regenerates all your Points and shows you all the newspaper articles that highlight events in your country.

Resources

Resources are extracted from the structures you build (towns, farms, etc.) When you click on resources in your inventory, they are converted into Points or Cultural Items. There are resources like Metal, which you acquire by mining, but there are also abstract resources like Ideas.

Culture

Like mentioned earlier, you can convert Resources into Cultural Items. For example, there is a random chance that a Resource can get converted into a Cultural Item like a novel, poetry compilation, etc.

From there, you can give it a name, change its appearance, and then add it to your collection of your country’s produced cultural works.

Every cultural item you create will raise your Country Satisfaction level, meaning that culture serves a distinct purpose for keeping your nation happy.

The newspaper events at the end of each Day should reveal to you how your population is feeling as a result of this.

Environment

The environment is full of many natural landscapes. In the start of the game, you can place your country anywhere you want. This means you could have a nation hiding in the freezing mountains, camped in the arid desert, or living on an isolated island: highlighting how human populations can find ways to survive in any part of the world.

The more you build, the more your Environment bar will drain (forcing the player to consider how they use their land and what they place down). This means that they can’t just destroy everything in search of resources for they will poison their own citizens if they cause environmental damage.

Even the names of some of the tools used in the game for shaping the environment around you have very drastic and direct names for what they do. Instead of something like “Axe” for a tool for chopping wood, the tool is called “Deforestation” and has an image of a chainsaw cutting a tree stump. There are other tools like “Mining Excavator”, “Monoculture Grass”, “Land Reclamation”, and “Grove”.

I would argue that “Grove” should not belong on this list as a form of environmental destruction, but I think that any form of human interaction with the environment should be highlighted: that forest you just built wasn’t there before, who knows what effect it might’ve had on the animals or plants that were already living there.

If a player neglects their environment for long enough, they will lose the game in a game over screen similar to what is shown below.

To Be Improved

Countryworks functions very well at teaching the player how to be conscious of their environmental decisions. It teaches them to handle resource management in a different way through the challenges the game provides.

In the future, I would like the Country Satisfaction health bar to be more sophisticated. At the moment, it goes down during random events such as infrastructure breakdowns where the citizens will be unhappy. However, the only way to bring the Country Satisfaction back up is by producing Cultural Items (which have nothing to do with infrastructure), so in the future I will make infrastructure distinct from (but somehow related to) Country Satisfaction.

Conclusion

As I didn’t have enough time to gather detailed feedback on how the player perceived the environmental message, I still have work to do in the area of value messaging. The game is quite limited in scope but it definitely has the possibility of being something much more creative and sophisticated. I hope to improve on it more in the coming months and hopefully I will have something that is much more replayable and fun.

I had a lot of fun working on it and I hope to eventually publish it to my page at syndhex.itch.io.

Game by Bastión Toledo-Altamirano