TreeSearch
TreeSearch is an educational game designed to teach about the ecological succession of the boreal forest following a forest fire. The user is playing as a junior park ranger that has to find key species belonging to each stage and learn about their adaptive characteristics in order to collect badges.
Client
Michael Corrin, UofT
Tools
Miro, Figma, Illustrator, After Effects, Unity
Audience
Grade 9 Students
Format
Educational Game
Collaborators
Linda Ding, Amy Jiao, Joshua Koentjoro, Livia Nguyen, Emily Tjan
Date
2023
Ideation
The process of ideation started with multiple rounds of pitching ideas and voting for our favourites. We ended up choosing to make an educational game on ecological succession of the boreal forest after a forest fire because we thought it was an important topic to highlight as the boreal forest is the largest biome covering Canada.
Visual Inspiration
We began looking for inspiration and settled for a 2D hand drawn style to accommodate the organic and natural yet whimsical feel of our game. We were also inspired by the playfulness of scout badges that would fit our ranger park theme and that would appeal to our younger audience.
Asset Development
During our asset development phase, one of our biggest challenge was finding the right balance of details for our main elements. We first drew all our plant species in a more realistic manner but then, after putting it all together in the scene, we realized that all the details was lost as we shrunk the elements into a smaller frame. Although this style was more effective in carrying more visual information on the plants themselves, it didn’t suit the playful feel we wanted to convey. On the other end of the spectrum, we considered rendering the plant species in a simpler way but too much crucial information was lost so we settled for a style that would balance playful and educational.
A Figma prototype of the game can also be accessed by clicking on the image above!
Scene Development
We wanted our game frame to contain 2 main elements: (1) the rotating forest where the user can search for the key species and (2) the park ranger journal containing all the key species to identify. We struggled with finding a way to make these elements coexist harmoniously and make the whole scene more breathable. To solve this, we decided to remove the stage introductory text from the journal as well as the species card to instead put the species directly on the journal pages. We also opted for putting the forest onto a rotating island to make it less boxy and allow the game background to be used as a backdrop for the forest.
