MAX KENNEDY
FIRESTICKS
Actually, you can fight fire with fire
Firesticks was created by a 4-member team in partnership with the Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation. An educational environmental management game set in a rural Queensland town and the surrounding bushland, Firesticks teaches players to learn to utilise their resources to effectively care for the surrounding Australian bushland.
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TEAM MEMBERS
Jade Lawrence (Artist)
Max Kennedy (Designer)
Piper Jarvinen (Artist)
Xavier MacKay (Programmer)
DURATION
4 weeks of pre-production
9 weeks of development
ENGINE
Unity
CONTRIBUTIONS
Mechanics Design
UI Design
Game Feel + Playtesting
World Design
PRE-PRODUCTION
During pre-production, the team analysed and discussed the brief presented alongside the specific learning points required by the industry partner. The game had to be educational with a target demographic of children ages 9-12 living in rural areas, where they would be taught about the different types and significance of cultural burnings.
The consensus from the team was that the final game's mechanic had to be a fun and interactive representation of traditional burning techniques that the target demographic of our game would find easy to pick up and master in a single classroom learning session. From this point, the team split up to brainstorm and create eight total concepts to answer the brief. A combination of a few ideas were selected and merged into a prototype for a top-down environmental management game.
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Visually inspired by titles such as The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Harvest Moon (1996), the Firesticks world is designed to be bright and friendly. Considering the game’s scale and compression, it was not intended to be an accurate simulation of the Australian bush. However, the simplification and abstraction of reality aims to make these educational topics accessible and enjoyable to younger audiences.
DEVELOPMENT
Initial concepts for the mechanics behind the cool and hot burning activities had players performing different tasks depending on their location in the game world. However, from playtester feedback, we quickly noticed that having to perform different actions and mechanics for each type of burning was requiring naïve players to remember too much information about the mechanics themselves, and not retaining the educational information we wanted to teach players.
This strayed away from the design philosophies set by the team in pre-production. A more simplified approach was prototyped that involved players racing between points to create patterns, intertwining with how the techniques are performed in the real world. The concept could be transferred to other actions within the game such as extinguishing fires, and subsequent playtesting results showed that players showed a quicker understand and mastery of the mechanics as well as beginning to retain more of the educational information being presented.
REFINEMENT
In the second half of the development phase, I shifted my focus towards the design of the Firesticks world. Collaborating with both of the artists on my team, we drafted a selection of modular tile sets that could be used to create paths, trees and water in areas of the map. Additionally, each of the areas also had to contain a variant of whether they were healthy, dry, very dry or burnt. I am most proud of how each of the areas on the map felt unique in their own way, especially the rural town situation in the centre of the map.