Corpromise
My Role:
Artist
Game Designer
Game Tester
Duration:
April 2018 - Jun 2018
What is Corpromise?
Corpromise is a board game created to explore climate change issues in a competitive yet realistic way.
Corpromise is a competitive game of cooperation. We seek to challenge our players to think critically about the way companies and individuals operate when confronted with global climate change issues.
Our game aims to illustrate that a solution will require the world working together to survive. Corpromise is designed to emulate the tragedy of the commons. We hope that players leave the game with a larger view on the internal conflicts which play a pivotal role in why some companies and individuals refuse to cooperate for the sake of our shared future.
Challenges
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To understand the cause and effect of climate change and incorporate those into a board game.
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Create a game that challenges the players to not only play to win the game, but also think about the consequences of their actions.
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Create a game that conveys the players that every action that takes can make an impact on the environment.
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Including no winner as one of the game results.
There were several challenges we encountered as we were creating Corpromise.
Concept Phase
The initial ideas of the game concept are:
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The player who makes $1000 wins.
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If the gas emission meter goes up to 100 everyone loses.
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The game will have players to choose between Personal Good and Public Good cards. If a player chose to draw a Personal Good card, they will gain more money, but at the same time do more damage to the environment (higher gas emission). On the other hand, if the player decided to go with Public Good, they will make less money but will have no gas emission.
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Game Ideation
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There will be a season wheel which advances after all the players complete their turns.
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There will also be World Event Cards that will impact all players. An example will be "Major Blizzard: burning more logs. Gas emission + 20." There will be 4 different levels of severities: 0, 25, 50 and 75. 0 being the least severe card, and the 75 is the most severe that might kill all the players at once.
Paper Prototype
Final Features
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The game now requires 4 players and can only play with 4 players (other numbers will break the balance).
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The first player to reach $1000 wins the game (the money is now represented with spaces, each bigger bubble is $100, and the smaller dots between the bigger bubbles are $25).
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One of the major changes in the final version is that we get rid of the Personal Good/ Public Good cards, instead, we replaced them with a four-sided die with a reference key.
Reference Key
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The second major change is the way the Gas Emission Meter works. In the beginning, we had some issues keeping track of the personal monetary gain and the gas emission, so I came up with the solution of using Lego pieces to keep track. The longer ones stand for 10, and the shorter ones stand for 5. It worked fine. It was a lot easier to visualize the meter, but in terms of the aesthetic, it wasn't the best choice. Therefore, we came up with our final solution — World Trees. There are 20 of them, so instead of the gas emission reaches 100 everyone dies; it became if all the trees are gone, everyone dies. The World Trees added more depth and helped to enhance the game feel.
World Tree
