Fungy now available!

Fungy is finally out! We worked on this game for Fourcast Lab at the University of Chicago to get incoming students thinking about climate change in new and interesting ways. It is full of witty dialogue, fun Easter eggs, and very contemporary commentary!

The Design of the Game

Fungy is constructed around the complexities of conversation and cooperation, two of the most vital pieces of progress towards overcoming climate change issues. More specifically, Fungy with complex concepts such as personal interests, stereotypes, stale-mate arguments, etc.. The premise of introducing the mushroom as a main character is to convey the experience of being an individual alienated by its community, but nevertheless affected by their environment. As an insignificant mushroom attempts to convince their peers to help combat climate change, players are inclined to find relevance by using various communication tactics such as empathy, facts, anger, etc. Different tactics stimulate different outcomes, and different outcomes reveal different perspectives.

Reflections

Fungy is the biggest project that I have worked on thus far. It started off as just a twine game, and then we asked, "why can't this be an RPG?" It was a good learning experience to practice with tilemaps, pixel art, and building large scale architecture to make building the rest of the game easier.

There are a few things I wish had gone differently, of course. First of all, as the programmer, I didn't bother setting anyone else on the team up with Unity collaboration. Since the game started small, I thought that teaching everyone how Unity works would not have been very useful. As the project became larger and larger, I was very wrong. Towards the end of the project, I was being sent tons of art and dialogue to implement since I was the one with Unity. This was definitely my fault. Lesson learned!

The other issue was that as the architecture changed, I did not change the way that code was structured. I could practically hear my Computer Science professors scolding me! Things that used to connect and could reasonably go in one script no longer connected. Overtaken with the urge to progress rather than restructure, I continued and ended up with a 1,000+ line file that definitely did not need to be that long. Finally, as our project's ideas expanded, we started reaching for more and more. I wouldn't exactly say that feature creep kicked in, but we were definitely unrealistic about our deadline. We only had a month, and towards the end of it, I was working 12 hours straight and even through weekends on it. As my boss said, “you guys need to learn how to say no to yourselves.” Lesson learned again! 

Hopefully we can bring all those ideas to life in the future, but with the school year starting up again, it will be hard to get everyone working in one place again at a consistent schedule. With the ideas we have, it would take another 4-6 months before the game is ready. We believe that we are going to start a new project during the year since we were a bit disheartened about not being able to add some features in time, but if enough people are interested, we would absolutely pick up on this game again during the year.

If people aren't interested, one day we will come back to it anyway, just... A bit more slowly!

Thank you for playing, and I hope from the bottom of my heart that you enjoy this game <3