Critterland Project Recap

Critterland is an ecosystem-inspired video game built by students Kendall Zhu, Richard Amankwaa and Saketh Rama, with music by Collin Lewis. Originally conceived within the Harvard Game Development Club as an exploratory artistic and learning project, Critterland is now a full puzzle/strategy video game available both on browser, and Steam for free download: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1367880/Critterland/.

Thanks to the HCS builders incubation program, the Critterland team was able to turn a fun artistic vision into a finished product. Here’s an outline of the steps we’ve taken along the way:

1. Goal/Vision: Originally inspired by Kendall’s early interest in evolution simulators, Critterland is an attempt to turn free-form ecosystem dynamics into a visual, interactive, and fun experience for video game enthusiasts. In the gaming world, we’ve seen a number of popular evolution-inspired strategy games such as Spore and Species, as well as older ecosystem simulators such as SimLife. Games in this genre navigate a trade off between building a rich and authentic simulation, while also hand crafting strategy mechanics that are rewarding and provide progression. In pursuing compelling content in both areas, many games become very complicated. With Critterland, we wanted to model ecosystem gameplay in a simple way without losing the intrigue of bottom-up simulation dynamics. We also wanted to incorporate a mix of intensity and lighthearted humor into the game’s emergent struggle for survival.
2. Prototyping and testing: This summer, we’ve made an effort to get earlier feedback by releasing incomplete versions of the game for playtesting. Thanks to friends and community members, we got a much better sense of the bottlenecks and frustrations in our user interface. The biggest change informed by the feedback was the tutorial system we introduced in our Campaign. We would have liked to iterate more, but the two rounds of feedback were already invaluable given our short development timeline.
3. Presentation and delivery. Critterland combines simple mechanics and complex interactions — a dream combination for ecosystem inspired gameplay. We created a category-based adaptation system with defaults in every category for both plants and animals. This avoids number crunching and grindy ability trees, instead providing balanced, intuitive, and interesting trade offs. The 2D maps and sprites complement the simple design by showing which adaptations each critter possesses and letting the player see everything that’s happening on a single screen. We hope players enjoy tinkering with their critters, and watching the craziness that ensues!

Critter Builder Adaptations

Campaign Level Featuring Plants and Animals