Vision

A digital board game, that through a hybrid between collaborative and competitive mechanic raises the awareness about sustainability in food production.

Team

• Marcy Regalado - Interactive Design

• Jeff Kassab - User Researcher

• Eric Colbert - Product Manager

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 bode 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.

Game Mechanics

Terra Loop is at once a collaborative and competitive game. Players need to work collaboratively to ensure the survival of the planet. The competitive aspect of the game comes from the players trying to reach a certain number of regenerative farms first in order to win the game. In their quest for regenerative farms, players can steal farms from other players or intentionally cause plots of land to go barren, however, they need to keep the balance of the game in mind since Gaia will reflect their actions into the gameplay during the next year.

Design Language

Having a mix of a futuristic, positive but at risk, organic and scientific and sort of mythical vision, we defined the design language of the game. Following a top down approach for design, everything was defined as symbols in Figma that could be easily editable and updated to all the applications in which they were used, either in the same software or in Principle.