Terra Loop - Digital Board Game
About Terra Loop
Terra Loop is a digital board game guided by Gaia, the Last Elder, as the oracle who entrusts a group of humans traveling back to 1999 to stop The Lastings, a series of irreversibly devastating climate events. The game’s design, theme, and structure are curated around the intersection of food and sustainability while having fun and bringing awareness. Working as a farm leader, can players grow, harvest, and invest in agricultural lands while competing yet collaborating with each other?
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About the Team
Infusion Van is a multidisciplinary team brought together during our capstone project for at the Stanford University’s M.S. in Engineering, Design Impact program. It is comprised of Marcy Regalado (UX Designer and Sound Wizard), Jeff Kassab (UX Researcher and Animation Enthusiast), Manu Garzaron (Product, Visual and UX Designer and maker of various mediums), and myself, Design Engineer and Project Manager.
Mindmap during ideation process
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Brainstorming, through Mural
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Prototype, using Catan pieces
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First Steps
A high-level exploration of our process to design Terra Loop could be broken down into two steps: (1) Developing fun game mechanics, and then (2) adding in the teaching aspects. We knew if the game was not captivating, people would not play, and as a result not learn. We spent the first week playing around with various themes until we narrowed it down to a hybrid competitive and collaborative game centered around sustainable farming.
We started with a rough set of rules we patchworked together from other games we have played and began playtesting through zoom using physical board game pieces from Catan. This proved to be a very easy and useful way to iterate on the game mechanics and quickly hone in on a basic set of rules, actions, and game pieces. A couple weeks into this process, we developed a low fidelity digital version of the game using Mural to allow for playtesting with users outside of our Infusion Van team. |
Playtesting
Once we were able to translate the physical prototype to a digital one, we were able to quickly and regularly playtest with various people with varying levels of board game experience. Over the course of a month we went through 13 game versions, iterating with various game mechanics and rules. A major focus of our playtesting was to strike a satisfying balance between collaborative and competitive gameplay. In our first playtests, players would completely disregard the collaborative aspect and often wound up losing as a whole team. As players played the game more often, they shifted their mindset to thinking about the well-being of mother earth and played more conservatively. This shift in the mindset boded well for our game mission centered around raising awareness. Having achieved a mix of fun and awareness-building, we could now focus on bringing the Terra Loop experience to the next level through a high-fidelity design of all game elements and interactions.
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Game Mechanics Definition
The objective of Terra Loop is simple: Individually move, harvest, invest, and cultivate agricultural centers until one player successfully builds the desired number of reGen farms. However, all of the players collectively must conserve mother nature and actively prevent the board from becoming barren to avoid losing entirely.
This game strikes a balance between pursuing your own interests while considering the well-being of the earth you are living in. Players perform various actions every turn to collect aggies (agricultural currency), acquire utilitarian knowledge, and ultimately cultivate farms to complete the objective. Each round Gaia reveals a world event that can amplify the good and poor actions performed by the players. This agent of change introduces a sense of randomness that keeps the players on their toes.
This game strikes a balance between pursuing your own interests while considering the well-being of the earth you are living in. Players perform various actions every turn to collect aggies (agricultural currency), acquire utilitarian knowledge, and ultimately cultivate farms to complete the objective. Each round Gaia reveals a world event that can amplify the good and poor actions performed by the players. This agent of change introduces a sense of randomness that keeps the players on their toes.
Design Language
Conclusion
Designing a digital board game about food sustainability was the best idea we could come up with. First of all, we had a lot of fun during our last quarter at Stanford. Second, we learnt so much about game dynamics and mechanics (UX design), running playtests (UX research in game design) and iterating based on learning multiple times, and once we had the mechanics nailed, each of us focused on different mediums to define the different deliverables of the game: hi-fi visual design, interactive prototypes and final trailer. The game would be ready to be developed and implemented, if as a team we decided to go on that quest.
Tools used: Mural and Zoom for ideation and UX research, User observations, qualitative interviews and surveys, Figma for visual design, Principle for prototypes, Unity for 3D aspect used during the trailer, and Adobe Premiere for editing of trailer.