Devlog 1 - Concept

How would you describe your game?

Our game is a survival-based board game where players take on the role of a European otter trying to reach a safe habitat. Along the way, they must face obstacles such as polluted waters, highways, and human threats while trying to collect enough food and shelter to survive. The game highlights the struggles of otters, making players experience the real challenges these animals face.

What decisions have been made so far in regards to:

Engagement of the  game with the selected theme:
We wanted to make a game about an endangered species. We decided on one species: The otter. This animal also lives in the Netherlands, which is why we chose this as our subject. There are many different reasons the otter is facing extinction and most, if not all, of these reasons are man made. The otters are powerless to do anything, let alone standing up for themselves and that is just not fair.

Engagement of the  game with EU values:
One of the EU values is to protect and improve the quality of the environment. Currently the otter population is very low compared to what it used to be, due to negative human influences on the environment. Sadly the EU values are mostly focused on humans. Nature feels like a footnote instead of an important subject that also has a lot of influence on our future as a species and has an inherent worth on its own. Nature is mentioned only once and animals aren’t mentioned at all.  Animals also deserve dignity, freedom and rights and  because they cannot speak up for themselves, we wanted to use this opportunity to shine a light on this specific species and the hardships they go through because of us. 

Inspiration from the museum and kick-off:
We already knew we wanted to make a game about an endangered species, but we still had to figure out which one. We decided to go to beeldengeluidopschool.nl to search for inspiration. After searching this database we came about our subject: Otters. We also took inspiration from the way the museum conveys information. The museum had information exhibits, but it was given to the people in a gamified way. We wanted to use this method of conveying information for our game.

How did you come to these decisions?
We started with a brainstorm session. As a result of this session we came to the subject of endangered species. After searching the Beeld & Geluid database we figured out which animal we wanted to choose as our subject.

What are your action points for the upcoming day?
Our first course of action is putting the board together. We were not able to finish that today, so we will continue working on that tomorrow. We will also have to make pawns, some lists of events that can happen during the game and a comprehensive, but still simple to understand game manual. Then the game will be playtested and we will get a bunch of feedback we can use to improve our board game further.