Devlog for Sustainable Hope Jam

When I saw this jam, I knew it fit perfectly with a game idea I’ve had in the back of my mind for about 4 years now. I had begun to work on it around November 2021, and saw a link to the jam itself sometime towards the end of the year. I knew I would not be able to complete the project in the time available, but I also knew I should submit what I was able to complete. This project remains a work in progress, and I placed no deadlines on myself for when I will be done with it.

One of the biggest challenges for me with this project is my own physical health. I worked way too hard on figuring out how to be a good professor during the first year of the pandemic, and ended up injuring my arms in the process due to poor ergonomics and ramped up use of the keyboard. I’m still paying the price for that, and I know that a professionally laid out game is forever beyond the scope of my own capabilities to create. Even getting everything in my head to become words on the paper was not something I was able to accomplish. But here is the draft I will be continuing to work on. It is completely playable and has been play tested, but I can’t promise that anyone will figure out how to do that through all of the poorly formatted tables that still exist within the game.

But this is not the reason why I knew that the game fit perfectly with this jam. The game itself is about sustainable hope. It is about climate change and environmental disaster and what we can do about it. And by we I mean generations of people over the course of centuries. One of the key mechanics in this game is how much do you push for change now versus how much you store up to give to someone else who will be here when you’re gone. Although this game has been in the back of my head for many years, it took living through a pandemic to make it what it is now. What I thought were the solutions to climate change 4 years ago are not really the solutions to climate change. Maybe I don’t even know the solutions, but I see in the gap of how we have addressed the pandemic where maybe we need to put some more focus as we address the still present dangers to our habitation. I don’t want to give away too much, but it is not just the scientists who are going to be doing the work. And I say this as somebody with a PhD in chemistry.