Zaiva - BOSK

Zaiva is a narrative-driven pixel art game that sheds light on deforestation through interactions with forest animals.

Total Time: 5 months

Development Time: 1 month

Team: Koen Kribben, Karlijn Suurd, Fauve Vlegels, Jamie Yin & Brent Vos

Play the game HERE.

Zaiva was made to show children between 10-12 years old the consequences of deforestation. By doing research and testing with the target audience, we chose to make a narrative-driven game that primarily focuses on interacting with animals, and helping them with their problems related to deforestation. The game ends with a happy-ending, because we had observed that children are already constantly being reminded of a grim future, when it comes to climate change.

Contribution

During this project, I was the lead-developer. For this project I made various features, such as: Dialogue, Inventory, Movement, Progression & Quests.

I also contributed to the UX of the game, by making subtle animations and particle-effects, such as: Dialogue-popups, experience numbers & planting trees.

Asides from programming, I was greatly involved in the design phases of the project. This includes storytelling & game-design. But also concepting, researching & testing with the target audience.

Technical

On the left is an example of a quest made using Scriptable Objects (SO's). A quest has multiple phases, in this case it is divided between a "Collect" task and a "Deliver" task. I was easily able to create and edit quests like this.

Looking back at it however, a direct reference to the scripts wasn't a good way of handling this system. I would've not included these direct references in the SO and either have these assigned in the inspector or create a seperate SO for NPCs to reference to. Or maybe use an ID.

On the left is the first ever reusable system that I've made. I originally made this event-system for the Forsaken Soul project. I then cleaned it up a bit, and made it simpler for the needs of this project. And it worked fairly well.

The example on the left shows how the player has to complete different conditions in order to start a dialogue.

At the time however, I didn't know that changing SO's in runtime wasn't a good idea. Looking back at it, I would've copied the data of the SO and use a separate data script to handle its runtime state.

On the left is a bit of code that I wrote for the rewards in the game. I wanted to show it, because this is shows how I structured my code at the time. I still usually create private editable parameters, and then have a public getter for other classes to access.

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