Civic Seed
Civic Seed is an online multiplayer RPG and collective art project developed to prepare college students for community service. It was tested at Tufts University to enhance learning and deepen students' understanding of community contexts. Read below for the game mechanics and story.
The Call
Many incoming university students are eager to get involved with the school's partner communities and create positive change. However, to most, the people, challenges, and histories of these communities are unknown, and under-trained volunteers can even do more harm than good. For local organizations, it's difficult to know which students have the necessary knowledge and skills to collaborate effectively and whose personal goals align with the goals of the organization and the community.
The Response
Civic Seed is on online, HTML 5 multi-player RPG and interactive art project to prepare college students for community service work that is now an integral part of many undergraduate experiences. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service —which promotes a culture of active citizenship for Tufts students throughout the university and in their communities — were particularly interested in testing a game to enhance student learning and deepen understanding of the social and historical context of the organizations and communities they are conserving.
After incorporating feedback, the game was launched in February 2014 with student groups engaged in community service on campus.
The Game: Story
Call to Action
At the start of the game, the players are told that the color has vanished from the world, and that they have been tasked to help restore it. The Botanist (our game guide) has developed special color seeds to this effect. If the players want to bring the color back, they must plant these seeds all over the world.
Additionally, there are recipes for improved seeds that the players must create by completing diagrams from the Botanist’s notebook.
Exploring the Mystery
As the players explore the world, talk to NPCs, and earn and plant seeds, more of the backstory comes to light. Through aspects of the NPC’s dialogue and rare sightings of a mysterious robot on the outskirts of the map, they learn that an Autonomous Harvesting Robot - T-Class (AHR-T) is the source of the color crisis. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that AHR-T has stolen all the color multiple times -- and that each time this happens, the people replant the color seeds.
The Big Reveal
After completing level 4, AHR-T sucks up all the seeds, rendering the world gray once again. Finally, the players learn the truth: it turns out, the robot was an invention of the Botanist, designed to fertilize and harvest more colorful crops, but instead, it went haywire and sucked up all the color.
The Botanist is at his wit’s end, believing that no matter what he does, the cycle will only continue.
Boss Battle and Final Sequence
Now, the players must use the skills and knowledge mastered in the game to defeat the robot once and for all. The seeds, which they used to color the world, take on an extra effect: they illuminate hidden objects under the ground. To defeat AHR-T, they must race against time to uncover the four hidden control ports, and test their understanding of the content one last time at each.
This overwhelms the seeds in AHR-T’s collection bag, which rapidly expands and explodes like a giant bag of microwave popcorn. The seeds fly everywhere, floating on the breeze and bringing color back to the world where they land.
Additional features of the full game:
Music and sound effects
Animated intro and finale sequences
Timed boss level
Hidden “Easter Egg” seeds
Collaborative challenges
Sharable Community Service Resumes
The Game: Art
The art of Civic Seed, and the credit for all the images I use on this page, belongs to Aidan O’Donohue.
The Game: Code
Civic Seed was programmed in javascript utilizing Node.js, MongoDB, web sockets, and Heroku for browser compatability across a variety of devices. The lead developer was Russell Goldenberg, with additional programming by Lou Hang.
Additionally, development took advantage of:
S3 Tools - command line tools to assist with deploying to an Amazon S3 instance
Heroku Toolbelt - command line tools to assist with deploying to a Heroku environment
Tiled - map editor for generating tilesheets for the game.
Bower - front end package manager. Some libraries have been retrieved via Bower, but this is very optional.
Nodemon - command line Node server wrapper that automatically restarts it when server-side scripts change.
The code for Civic Seed is open source and can be found here on Github.
