Eco Adventurers: Habitat Heroes Game

This was one of my favourite games to work on at Twinkl. The product owners wanted to make a game about helping animal habitats and to use the already established Eco Adventurers IP Twinkl has. 

It was decided that this game should be a quest based game due to me thinking this was the best way to deliver the learning objectives of saving habitats. There are 7 levels, each aimed at a different year group (EYFS to Year 6 for UK school years or 3 - 11 for human years).

I got to write over 1000 lines of dialogue for this game and work with the product owners to make sure it covred all of the learning objectives. The dialogue covers branching options and optional conversations.

As this was a game about saving habitats, quests involved: 

• Picking up litter
• Pikcing up sticks
• Making recycling bins
• Collecting food
• Placing water collectors
• Placing cameras
• Placing no entry signs
• Helping out the animals with their problems
• Convincing Lexus the Axolotl to not show off his collection of litter in the rivers of Mexico City
• And more

This game was a fun game to design. Having almost free reign over the dialogue, I was able to create little self contained stories about why the animals need help and what they are trying to do. Some NPCs would state facts, others would just make a funny comment and some would react to quests you have completed.

Eg: After placing recyling bins, a platypus says "This bin will be my new home".

Eg: After feeding a family of Tapir, each member of the family will thank you. One NPC will point out a plot hole of there being food right next to the family.

This was firstly a fun feature I wanted to add but also I wanted to send a message that little actions you make will be noticed, as I want the player to think they can make a difference with the actions they make in their lives and not feel hopeless.

Quizzes in this game test knowledge but are disguised as regular conversations. Salamanders will ask you for help with homework, a snow leopard will ask for help with a social media post, a Pangolin will need you to explain to them how they get food so they stop telling poachers where other pangolins are or convincing Lexus the axolotl to not show off his litter collection in the rivers of Mexico city. There are many more unique situations like this. They are silly, but test knowledge, but not in a boring quiz way, but through branching converations with NPCs. Planning dialogue with branches was a fun feature to plan and to program.

This game also have dialogue to cover each situation. All quest NPCs will have the following situations when talking to them:

• Player talks to the NPC and the NPC gives the player a quest
• Player talks to the NPC after getting the quest but hasn't completed it
• Player talks to the NPC after completing the quest
• Player talks to the NPC after being rewarded for completing the quest

Some however will have quest objectives that can be completed before the quest is given, like picking up litter. So this happens:

• Player talks to the NPC after completing the quest before they are given the quest

This gives unique dialogue that rewards they player and also prevents an awkward situation of the player accepting a quest and then having to talk to the NPC stright away to hand in the completed quest.

This game also let me utilise shaders. Some animals use gradient colour swaps on a greyscale sprite, this reduces memory required and saves the artists time as they need to draw and animate only 1 animal as opposed to 10. This also lets us give each NPC more variety at no additional cost.

Here is a playthrough of 2 levels from the game: