Making We Are The Caretakers and Creating A Game From Conservation Inspiration
We Are The Caretakers is Heart Shaped Games’ new strategy game available now on Steam Early Access after nearly three years of development. On the surface, it’s a sci-fi game, with masked heroes working to fight extraterrestrial threats, but when you play it, you’ll find a more profound metaphor about animal conservation and working together to save our planet, along with a desire to give 10% of game revenue to save rhinos. I want to share a bit about how we went about creating We Are The Caretakers with inspirations from real-life conservationists and how we discovered our Afrofuturist world and game design along the way.
The Call
As early as 2017, our team met with several conservation enthusiasts, groups, and experts. Their accounts and experiences inspired us to build a pitch around a game that could have players tackle the challenges and tradeoffs they faced. We quickly realized that there were clear systems at play, at many levels, both in the field and in organizational planning. We saw the seeds of a grand strategy game but with a very different structure: taking many characters with various skills, sending them into large maps, looking to protect and care for animals instead of taking territory and fighting monsters.
As we made progress on development and learned more about the challenges real-world people faced, we wanted to see if our game could be fun, build awareness, and contribute directly to conservation efforts. We started looking for a conservation program that we believed in and could support, and we were lucky to meet the perfect partner. The Wildlife Conservation Network (WCN) and their Rhino Recovery Fund (RRF) had great people active in the field, saving Rhinos.
Translating Truths Into (Science) Fiction
Inspired by WCN and the RRF effort, we wanted to build a game world that players would love, regardless of how much they knew about our topic. Through incredible concept art by Anthony Jones and narrative development by BAFTA, and IGF-nominated writer Xalavier Nelson Jr, our team developed an Afrofuturistic world that would be exciting and speak authentically to our topic as the player engaged.
Our journey with the game doesn’t end here, however. It’s just the start and we want it to include you! With Early Access, we’re inviting everyone to help us shape the game together, through the direction its gameplay and story take. We’d love to get your feedback in our Discord server after playing.
Moving forward, we plan to showcase incredible people doing remarkable work to keep you engaged with the organization you are supporting to change the world. For now, we’ll leave you with a message from one of the real-world caretakers making a difference and, remember, We Are The Caretakers.
