TheParksDepartment

An educational game built in Godot to teach ecology concepts like species balance and environmental management. Features animal AI, ecosystem health, and placeable structures.

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The Parks Department

Core Information

Team Members

Project Abstract

This educational video game teaches responsible forestry, species identification, and invasive species control through an engaging simulation. The game combines the task of growing and maintaining a wildlife reserve with protecting native species, while defusing threats like wildfires or invasive species. Players also grapple with key questions through play, such as raising funds while preserving their mission.

Building

The first button, “Building,” will pull up a menu of all of our available buildings. Some buildings, like the research center, can help the user by allowing them to get an extra animal release per day, or the fence can be used to separate or enclose species you need to control the population of.

Animal Status

The next is the “Animal Status” button. This will list the current count of all of the animals in your environment. This is useful for the user to see their progress on balancing their ecosystem.

Plant Status

Similar to the previous button, “Plant Status” will pull up a menu displaying the current count of grass in your environment. This can help the user understand how having too many herbivores can affect your food count.

Releasing

The last button on the left half is the “Releasing” button. This one is most similarly compared to the building menu. Once clicked, a menu pops up of all of the current animals you can release into your environment.

Pause, Play, and Fast Forward

These buttons can be used to help the speed of your environment.
Pause - Stops all interactions and systems like the animals and guests.
Play - 1x speed (normal speed).
Fast Forward - 2x speed.
These buttons can be best compared to the “Sims” games. Allowing the user to generate income quickly at the expense of losing some control or pausing the game to intervene with a potential issue in your environment before it happens.

Fun Fact

The last button located on the right is the “Fun Fact” button.

Clicking the guidebook pulls up a pop-up menu of a random fun fact about the animals we designed, all Ohio native species.

Settings Menu

Resolution: 800x600, 1280x720, 1920x1080 (default), 2560x1440, 3840x2160.
Window Type: Full Screen (default), Windowed, and Borderless Windowed FPS: 30, 60, 120, 144, and 240 - default set based off system settings.
Quality (non-functional): Low, Medium (default), and High

Escape Menu

If the user was to press "Esc" the game will pause and bring up the following menu.
Continue - Return to Game.
Save Game (non-functional) - Save the current state of the user's ecosystem to their device.
Settings - Same as above.
Quit to Menu - Returns to the main menu screen.
Exit Game - Closes the application.

User Manual

When the user first starts the game, they're given an unbalanced environment only inhabited by herbivores. This might not sound like much of a problem, but the result of not interacting with the environment is the herbivores repopulating and eating all of the available food (grass) faster than it can grow.
The user can intervene by releasing carnivores such as the Eastern Wolf, Coyote, or Cooper Hawk to help control the population.

Ecosystem health

In order to reward the user for having a natural and balanced ecosystem, the game calculates your ecosystem's health based off the real-world statistic called the Shannon's Biodiversity Index. Using the number of species the user has introduced into their environment, along with tracking the number of animals of each species that are currently alive in the environment, the game will award the user more funds per guest who visited the park.

Funds

As the user plays the game, guests will follow a dirt path to view your ecosystem. Once a guest reaches the end tunnel, the guest pays a baseline $5 for their experience. That $5 is then multiplied by the ecosystem health statistic; the user can generate anywhere between $5 and $25 per guest.

Release Count

In order to control the number of animals the user can release into the environment at a time, we've introduced a releasing count system. This limits the user to 5 animal placements per day. The user can build a research center to increase the number of placements by one.

Software

We are using the Godot engine, which is an open source game engine (https://github.com/godotengine/godot).
We also are using Blender to create models and animations (https://www.blender.org/download/).

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