120% funded, first Stretch Goal reached, and Dev Blog 3!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Sep 01, 2021 at 12:06:29 AM

The big news today is that we hit our first stretch goal! 

The Dual Layered Board has been unlocked, meaning that every copy of the game will be upgraded to this excellent feature. Yet, we're not all long-term board gamers here, so what does it mean?

As you can see with our prototype above, the game has its burdens flipped into the centre as you progress toward victory. These sit on top of the board, and as such, once they're in place, are raised about half a millimetre higher than the rest of the game. With the dual layer board, that outer edge will be raised to the same height, so that when you place those burdens into the centre they fit snugly into position, perfectly aligned, and look incredibly good! 

As the designer, I'm of the opinion that the dual layer is absolutely critical to the game looking and feeling excellent to play, and the extra layer of height that an expanded section will give (as opposed to the poverty hole) will create an extra level of thematic resonance. To put it simply; I'm so happy we've unlocked it!!

While we're here, did you know that our quantity of trees unlocked has risen to a whopping 🌲32 trees🌳!?! (That will make 672kgs of carbon absorbed per year once fully grown! Whoa!)

If you've just joined us on our ecological adventures, please check out our micro-goals on the campaign story and see how you can help us plant even more!

Alright, onward to dev blog #3! Today's subject... CARD DESIGN! Thrilling!

The Anatomy of a Social Influence Card

Social Influence cards are the primary element all players will be interacting with while playing Earth Rising, so what are they, and how do they work?

Shortened during play to just ‘Influence cards’, these tarot sized masterpieces represent both a Sustainable Practice and an Unsustainable Practice - with the former being a direct and practical replacement of the latter.

The cards are bordered by the coloured outline of the sector they belong to, with the name of sector in the centre for those who have difficulties with the colours. Either side we have the Sustainable Practice on the left, and the Unsustainable Practice on the right. This should be fairly clear to anyone who looks at the card, but did you know that the sides were chosen on purpose?

Designing More Than Just A Game

Due to western reading styles, the vast majority of the people of western nations scan images from left to right. Try it for yourself! Pick up a card or landscape picture and notice where your eye naturally jumps to “begin” taking in an image. The same principle is often applied in theatre, television and film composition! 

Since our primary audiences will be from the western world, we decided to make use of this to make it so that when you glance at a card, the first thing you take in is the Sustainable Practice. This means you’re more likely to see them more often, and as such, take in the names of them a little more. This is part of how Earth Rising creates a form of “learning by osmosis”, where you come away feeling like you’ve played a board game, and yet suddenly you can remember the names of all these sustainable options...

Speaking of names, the way their names are presented is also a purposeful decision, with the Sustainable Practice named on a white background, and the Unsustainable Practice named on a black background. This reinforces the connection that Unsustainable Practices are linked to Strain (which are both black), and will add those counters to the board. Similarly, Sustainable Practices are a purifying force, taking Strain away, and directly oppose those Unsustainable Practices, hence making them white.

It’s our hope that, with this subconscious connection making, Strain calculations can be that little bit more intuitive, and so become that much easier.

The Duality of Cards & Tokens

Yet it’s not the cards you focus on when you calculate Strain! Every Influence card corresponds to a Practice counter. In this way, your cards represent your character’s knowledge, understanding, contacts and ability to implement something in the world, while the Practices themselves are the real world processes. Once a Practice counter is on the board, you’re not just looking at a circle of card, but a constructive business, amenity or social mindset that is having an effect on your whole society.

As a result, your Influence card corresponds to both sides of the same Practice, allowing you to affect it with that card regardless of whether the Sustainable or Unsustainable side is on the board. This allowed us, in a mechanical sense, to create many more scenarios and interactions between the board and players without needing to double our quantity of counters!

By utilising double sides, we could use just seven counters per sector, and allow for mechanics such as the Status Quo cards, where how they affect a counter on the board is determined by which side is upright.

The Many Faces of an Ever Changing Society

Seven counters for each of the six sectors with two sides for each counter creates a huge amount of variance, and we were thrilled to find just how much replayability it created without ever feeling stale.

Many testers and reviewers have played the game upwards of ten times over, reporting that even though they knew the game deeply and understood the ins and outs of mechanics, they never reached a point where they didn’t have to carefully consider their turns. Turns which felt obvious due to having the right cards at the right time became quickly orchestrated chains of actions, but if you get over-excited about how many matching cards you have, you pay less attention to the slowly accumulating strain, only to notice the impending Ecological Collapse too late.

Earth Rising is a balancing act, and one that has many “spinning plates” as it’s been phrased, yet it’s also a slowly transitioning duality. Through your efforts you and your team of other specialists push back the tide of Strain and inequality that plagues our societies today, and whether you accomplish success within the 20 years set before you or not, you’ll always be able to look back and marvel at the progress you’ve made.

When you find an Unsustainable Practice in real life, try to remember: it’s just one side of one counter. We can change it, it just takes us working together.

This one (and the last one) has been longer than most of these will be, so if you're still with me - thanks for reading! For the next update, we've decided to let YOU decide! 

Which of our characters would you like to hear about? The Climatologist⛅, Ecologist🌱, Activist✊, Grassroots Politician⚖️, Innovator⚙️ or the Eco Investor💰? Let us know in the comments!

You've got two days to decide, so until Thursday! See you then...

~Laurie & the SDR Team

🎉🎊Earth Rising Fully Funded! 🎊🎉🥂🍾🌍
over 2 years ago – Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 11:48:07 PM

We did it! Oh my goodness we did it! I'll be honest, text just doesn't do it justice, so I recorded a short video for you all while riding the high of success! - Sorry for the camera shaking at certain points, I got too excited! 

 (You'll want to full screen it, Kickstarter made it huge and I can't resize it!)

No Dev Blog today because, honestly, let's just take a moment to celebrate! 🎊🎉 But we'll be back on Tuesday with a new one all about "The Anatomy of a Social Influence card". 

Until then, we cannot say thank you enough, so let's keep planting trees with those micro-goals and see if we can upgrade Earth Rising to the next level!

See ya Tuesday,

~Laurie & the SDR Team

85% funded! Dev Blog 2: Board Overview
over 2 years ago – Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 04:12:53 PM

How do you write an update when you're speechless? Let's just say, thank goodness my fingers can do the heavy lifting here because honestly I am just unable to process this.  85% funded by 72 hours? This is what they call (in the biz 😉) the home stretch, and yet somehow we're here already?  

All I can really say is that all us here at team SDR would like to give a huge thank you to everyone who has backed - you're making this game a reality, and if we keep up this momentum we may well hit some of our stretch goals too! 😵

Before we continue with the dev blog, I'd like to announce that we have increased the number of trees we've planted to 🌲25 trees🌳!! (That will make 525kgs of carbon absorbed per year once fully grown!)

If you've just joined us on our journey, check out our micro-goals down below our pledge details to see how you can help us plant even more! 

Last but by no means least, tonight at 6pmBST/10amPDT we will be playing Earth Rising live with Anje from Shenanjegans! You can find the steam here! We're super excited for it, and we'd love for you to come along! See Earth Rising in action, and see if we can save our world...

Board Overview: Breaking down our path away from breakdown

Welcome to day four of the Earth Rising development retrospective blog! Are you ready to be bored? No wait, I meant ‘board’! 

I promise that will be my lamest joke for the rest of the Kickstarter.

Seriously though, today I’m going to talk about the board! There’s quite a lot to it, and as such I’m going to split it into sections. We’ll be covering the sectors, ecological ceiling, the poverty hole, and how it ties it all together! 

The Six Sectors of Society

Fun fact: during development we had to purposefully cut down on S words. “Sustainable Social Practices taking Strain from one of the Six Sectors of Society” is a hell of a sentence!

The Earth Rising board is made up of six different sectors, each one making up a key area of human activity that any society relies upon. Without any one of these sectors, modern life as we know it would cease to be and the most baseline quality of life for everyone would decline. Imagine a life without power, water, necessities such as clothes or vehicles, or even accessible food… would it still be possible to live life as you do now?

Yet it’s even harder for people to imagine their society without a clear sense of culture (our society's core values and concepts they fundamentally agree on) or political structure (the way in which we are able to influence our society’s laws and functions). With no defined culture there would be no expectations for how people will act or react, or which ways of living are considered acceptable. This includes, for example, the expectation or value of education.

A political structure without the means for people to affect it (such as a dictatorship) or high in corruption would make you effectively powerless to the whims of the state, or in the case of a lack of codified rights, the whims of employers or landlords.

A lack of strong culture or political access may not cause starvation, but ultimately results in inequality of opportunity, and creates higher poverty. For more on this, check out the very well sourced Transition Report: Equal Opportunities in an Unequal World.

So hopefully this shows why all of these sectors are important! But did you know that each sector is also carefully placed? While not an exact science (all sectors depend on one another to some degree) each sector in the game is placed between the two sectors that are critical to their success. Industry relies upon a strong, dependable energy source alongside the non-consumable produce of the Agriculture sector (cotton and rubber, for example). Meanwhile a strong culture can only flourish with reliable infrastructure (be it through high quality homes and amenities, or the ability to access reliable work) and political access. Take a look at which sectors are beside each other, and consider what they need to function!

The Ecological Ceiling

The sectors need to function, that is absolutely clear. Throughout the last two hundred years we’ve developed our society and quality of life in leaps and bounds, and our incredible progress is something to be celebrated!

Yet it doesn’t come without a cost. The blue band around the edge of our society is the Ecological Ceiling, the boundary showing what our planet is able to comfortably withstand without damaging our ecology, and by extension, the ability for us to survive long-term. All Practices, Sustainable or Unsustainable, have an effect on our planet. Yet it’s our duty as inhabitants of this wonderful world we share to ensure that we put as little strain on it as we can.

Each sector takes different things from our planet in order to function, and in Earth Rising, it’s our job to transform our society so that these sectors reduce the strain they’re placing on our ecosystems. The planet and its ecosystems are resilient (as 40,000 years of human development has shown) but we’ve reached a point where our output is greater than its tolerance. Any strain that is placed over the Ecological Ceiling is strain beyond what the planet can handle.

The Poverty Hole

What’s that black mass in the centre of the board? It’s the poverty hole! Wooo!

Far from an actual party, the poverty hole is where people end up when their society fails to provide what’s necessary for them to live a balanced life. What constitutes a balanced life, you ask? Check out the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to get a good idea of what’s expected of modern societies to provide for their people, along with the risks that surround not reaching them. Many societies succeed on several of these goals, but fall short on others. Failing on any of these fronts provides the opportunity for people to fall through the cracks and slip into poverty.

Once in poverty, it’s very difficult to get out. In its most extreme form, homelessness can cause huge barriers to re-entry into safety, as without an address you cannot have a bank account, yet without a bank account you cannot get a job, which in turn is required to afford to rent and therefore get an address. Other forms of poverty prevent people from accessing education, healthcare, or nutritional needs. Being able to earn enough to pay your rent but without the ability to afford more than instant noodles to live on is still a form of poverty, and one that’s often overlooked.

Why do people in poverty put strain on our planet? It’s a topic worth a whole post of its own, and we’ll be posting that soon!

Finding the Balance

Social Practices in each sector provide what’s needed for people to live a healthy, happy, balanced life, and the more our society provides the easier it becomes for people to attain that standard. Yet providing for these needs in a way that our planet cannot handle will ultimately damage our biosphere, and in turn make it harder (due to natural disasters, pandemics, famines and a whole host of other consequences) for us to maintain our way of life. Balancing the needs of the people and the needs of the planet isn’t an easy task, but it is possible! It takes careful consideration, and acknowledgement of the consequences of our actions, but we can do it together, all while making life better for everyone.

Our next post will be on Sunday in two days time, so until then... Do you have any questions about the board or its design? Let us know in the comments!

~Laurie & the SDR Team

50% and Dev Blog 1!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 01:24:35 AM

Aaaalright! Welcome to day 2 of the Earth Rising Kickstarter and let me just begin by saying: Hello, welcome, and thank you everyone! 

We've been blown away by your incredible support, and... 

🎉WE REACHED 50% FUNDED IN UNDER 24 HOURS!🎉 

 This is a dream come true for us, and we're thrilled to have almost 200 people riding along with us! 

We have planted a total of 🌳21 trees🌲 in only 24 hours! Keep sharing and liking and commenting on the linked posts to help us amass a forest  (Fun fact: Once these 21 trees are fully grown they will absorb 441 kilgrams of CO2 per year!)

In other news, this Friday (27th) we will be doing a live-streamed playthrough of Earth Rising at 6pm BST | 10am PDT with the wonderful ShenAnjegans and we will be doing regular live Q&A's on our instagram too - so do come and say hi! 

Thanks again for supporting us this far, we can't wait to share more exciting news with you.

With that said, let’s get started with the developmental updates!

Earth Rising: Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the climate crisis

This first update is a simple overview about the process that brought Earth Rising into reality. As an autistic game designer I am driven first and foremost by passion, and despite the hopeful and upbeat aim and atmosphere of Earth Rising it’s a game that was originally born from a period of intense difficulty.

The culmination of environmental, political, and personal despair, this game was borne from a chance cinema viewing of the film ‘2040’, which interrupted the bleak message of 2019 that any action taken tomorrow was an act too late and instead showed how we could use real life practices that already exist to change our world and make things better - not just for the planet, but for people too. I discuss in detail Earth Rising’s origins in our website post: The Earth Rising Origin Story!

How We Talk About Something Affects How We Think About It

Two years later and the discourse on the climate world has changed. It seems clearer all the time that people can galvanise themselves behind a feeling that ‘it can be better’ than they can behind the idea that ‘it is going to be worse’. Yet the strongest understanding I have gained from everything I’ve learnt during my time making Earth Rising is that what people lack most of all isn’t hope or fear, it’s not motivation or energy, it’s actually understanding. Understanding starts with knowledge, and knowledge, especially in the scientific world, isn’t accessible.

But how do you make a complicated, wide reaching subject accessible? The answer, of course, is in small ways. Presented bite-sized, complexity can be overcome and made simple. Knowledge is the building block of understanding, and in order to understand something completely, you need to take in a fair few nuggets of info! They don’t need to be taken in all at once, in fact, people generally learn better by being able to process small elements at a time, slowly building up the size of their knowledge without being overwhelmed by the information. This is where we come to point two...

Make it fun! Anyone who has had a teacher inform them that “you’re not here to have fun, you’re here to learn” will likely also know that the two concepts aren’t actually exclusive. People take in so much more information when they’re enjoying themselves as their minds open up, ready to take in enjoyment, and the information rides in on the back of it. I like to imagine a small camel, which is your enjoyment, charging its way into your head with a pair of “info-humps” on its back. Make the info too heavy, or the fun-camel too small, and neither will be able to make it into your head.

Riding the Fun-Camel into the desert of Fear

Fight or flight isn’t just a concept our minds apply to physical threats. If we find a concept scary, we either fight it (climate denialists refusal to believe irrefutable facts, for example) or we flee from it. Another way to consider this last one is “disengaging” with it. Your friend or colleague who hears the climate crisis issues and shrugs, saying “it’s not like I can do anything about it” isn’t suggesting that they’re not taking it seriously, but instead finds it overwhelming and on a base level, pretty terrifying. But how do you face something you have no control over but ultimately impacts your entire future? The answer is, of course, that you can’t. So the brain switches it off. Like your nose switching off overpowering smells after half an hour of smelling them, or your ears tuning out the ticking of a clock. It’s not that the issue is gone, it’s just that the message being sent to your brain isn’t deemed helpful.

Damon Gamau broke my brain’s barrier to information by riding a fun-camel straight on through it with 2040. It gave me just enough information packaged in an outer shell of enjoyment that I was able to stop feeling scared by the climate crisis and started to feel empowered. For the first time, I felt able to think about it in a positive light.

Earth Rising is my fun-camel. It’s designed to ensure that everyone who plays has a good time, and in the process a few nuggets of information are carried into the brains of those who play. It’s my way of paying forward what 2040 did for me, and it’s my hope that with enough Earth Risings, 2040s and other ways of making our climate crisis accessible and understandable, we’ll overcome it together, as a species.

After all, if humanity is powerful enough to be able to accidentally change the atmosphere and ecosystems of an entire planet… just think what we could do, united, and with purpose.

Until next time,

~Laurie & the SDR Team

Relaunch and welcome back!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 09:34:21 AM

Welcome back to Earth Rising: 20 Years to Transform Our World!

Since this is a relaunch, many of you will be familiar with our game, its story, and its development. However! This is no ordinary relaunch!

Today I present to you a new and improved Earth Rising campaign, featuring the following:

• Cheaper core price of £40/$55
  
• A beautiful new first edition box, complete with shiny foiling, exclusive to our first production run!
  
• An improved story, displaying more information with clearer presentation, made possible with the kind feedback of our amazing and passionate backers!
  
• A vastly improved Pay-It-Forward! Greatly reduced price and now is donated to charities that will get Earth Rising into schools and libraries.
  
• A smaller, more compact game. It won’t dominate your table quite like it used to, but it’ll give you just as much of a great time! (it’ll also fit in a kallax now)
  
• Upcoming language accessibility! We’ve got translations in production for French, German and Spanish, with more to come!
  
• Distinct Solo play rules and a new “Quickplay” set up that will give a speedy challenge to experienced players.
  
• A new Micro-goal social media boost system, where we’ll increase Earth Rising’s positive impact on our world by purchasing trees in return for every five shares on a variety of social media platforms! Like some sort of Board Game Ecosia...
  

We’re so thrilled to have improved what we’re offering to everyone, and with the strong feedback we got from everyone involved in our development and Kickstarter we’re excited to get rolling with our fresh, new campaign!

Why the New Dawn Special Edition Box?

Throughout our social media and Kickstarter updates we’ve provided snippets and examples of what we’re changing to allow our fans to give feedback and be involved in creating a game they’re excited to own. As part of this, we gave two potential choices of First Edition box out for fans to look over, with a Night Sky and New Dawn box that would be made all the brighter with the edition of foiling on the starts and block text.

The overwhelming majority ended up calling for the New Dawn box art, and while the fans of the Night Sky were very vocal in their choice, ultimately we found ourselves agreeing with comments that mentioned how the Night Sky box made people think more of space than the earth, and was indicative of earth’s inhabitants “rising from the planet”.

It’s important that our game box reflects the game correctly, and we have made a few changes to the New Dawn box to better reflect the positive elements the Night Sky box had - such as the brighter, more highlighted sprout and improved lighting across the earth.

Development Blog Updates!

Throughout this campaign we’ll be bringing you regular updates - every other day to be precise - that will talk about the developmental process behind Earth Rising and the depths behind the thematic elements. Basically, the whys and hows behind Earth Rising’s methods of obtaining our sustainable future.

We’re excited to share them with you and to hear your comments! The first one will be tomorrow, so we’ll see you then!

~Laurie & the SDR Team