Eco Gen

Credits

Time In Development: 22/03/22 - 27/05/22

Person	Role(s)
Declan Lloyd	Lead Programmer, Lead Level Designer
Blaize Cairns	Lead Audio Engineer, Environment Artist
Connor Purnell	Lead Artist

About The Game

Eco Gen is a top-down 2D sandbox game developed in Unreal Engine 4.27. This was the 2nd and final project I worked on at Level 2 of my games design course at South Gloucestershire & Stroud College. It is based around the theme of the sea, and was designed with the goal of making a polished vertical slice of a game in only 10 weeks.

You have the goal of building up an ecosystem in an ocean environment. Placing sea creatures and decorations will gain you points, but letting the sea creatures die will lose you more points than they were originally worth. The points symbolize the health of your ecosystem. Going below 0 points will result in a game over, however gaining points to certain thresholds will expand the size of the map.

The sea creatures have a predator and prey system where they will chase any prey in-range, but run away from their predators that get too close (everything besides the creatures are just for decoration). Placing bigger creatures give more points, but can lose you more in the long run due to them having more types of prey to hunt.

The game was originally planned to have a hiding mechanic where each creature could hide from any predators chasing it by 'entering' the coral assets the player can place. We ended up cutting the hiding mechanic due to time constraints, but this gave us enough time to polish the game extensively.

How To Play The Game

This information is easily accessible from the main menu of the game file provided. Images of these menus are also provided below for your convenience.