Eco Gen

About The Game

Eco Gen is a top-down 2D sandbox game developed in Unreal Engine 4.27. This was the Level 2 final major project of my games design course at South Gloucestershire & Stroud College (Stroud Campus), with me assigned as the lead programmer and lead level designer from our group of 3 people.

We were given 3 themes to choose from; the cold, the sea and home. We chose the theme of the sea, designing the project with the goal of making a polished vertical slice of a game, in 10 weeks.

You must build and develop an ecosystem in an ocean environment. Placing assets will gain you points, but letting the sea creatures die will lose you points. The points symbolize the health of your ecosystem. Going below 0 points will result in a game over, however surpassing point 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. 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 near the end of development.

 

Credits

© South Gloucestershire & Stroud College

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

 

Controls

Input(s)	Action
W,A,S,D Arrow Keys	Movement
Left Mouse Button	Interact
	Open Pause Menu
	Toggle Inventory
	Reset Level

 

How To Play

Stumbling across a devastated ecosystem in the middle of the ocean you wonder, how did this happen? Discovering your inventory, you must fix this wasteland by placing new assets to rebuild the area, returning it to a thriving haven for all creatures.

The more the ecosystem is built up, the more space you gain access to. But be warned, deadly predators may consume too much, damaging the ecosystem all over again!