The micro budget for the game was about £100 ($125). This was all spent on buying images and photos from Dreamstime, some music and sound effects. I have no graphics design experience so buying images was a necessity and a time saver.
My objective was to design a 2D turn based game that was both educational and playable. Geology is a subject I studied at school. I've never worked in Geology, but I've always been interested in it as a hobby. I live along the Jurassic coast of England so I have varied geology on my doorstep. I grew up with it all around. An interest in Geology is a great excuse to go exploring.
Geological discoveries are made up of three main types : Rocks, Minerals and Fossils. Rocks are defined by how they are constructed and from which minerals. Fossils are often categorized by the period of Earth's history in which those creatures lived. 99% of them have since gone extinct. Minerals are defined by their atomic elements and molecular structure. Some are single elements, like Au (Gold), though most are a combination of elements. I wanted to represent all of this in the game in the simplest possible way. So each player is given a museum with exhibits organized in this geological format.
I also wanted players to experience how geological discoveries are made. This is normally done by cracking open rocks on the ground. Sometimes you find something inside a rock, sometimes you find nothing. So each location is a photo of that location with rocks spread randomly around that you can crack open with a geological hammer. Your geologist then returns the discovery to the museum to be exhibited in its correct category.
I spread locations all over the world based upon research I had done to determine where each discovery could be found. Some discoveries are very common, such as sandstone rocks. Others are only found in a particular location. Some fossils are widespread, others are only found in one location. For example, Trilobites and Ammonites are common worldwide but a dinosaur species might only be found on one continent.
I also added "decoration" to the game.
The first was to include tools. Tools are required to travel, open locations and find discoveries. Every time a geologists travels to a location, opens a location or opens a rock requires an expenditure of tools. Tools are gained each turn and tools can be found when opening a rock.
The second was developing the skill of the player's geologists. The more they travel, the more locations they open, the more rocks they open, all provide a gain to their skill level.
Thirdly, I added facilities to the museums to increase the number of visitors, income and prestige.
I also built a simple competitive element into the game. Essentially the player is competing against other museums for income, visitors and prestige.
I didn't hit too many technical difficulties developing the game. My main issue was the map of the world on which the player sends their geologists.
I didn't have a spinning globe to work with. And just finding consistent terrain map images of the world wasn't easy at the time. The best design I could come up with was a clickable map panel. Clicking on the panel shifts the focus of the screen onto a different part of the world. Not an ideal design. But it did allow me to display different parts of the world at different scales. Africa is far larger than Europe.
The other limitation was that there were only so many images available for purchase. There are thousands of minerals and fossils but I could only find a small fraction of those as images.
I've only sold about a 1,000 copies of the game so far. At the least, I hope it has increased some people's interest in the science of Geology. If I designed it now, no doubt I would make some changes. I developed it using version 2 of Godot, so it would take some work to upgrade the code to the latest version of Godot.
The game is available on Steam here : The Geology Game
Video playlist is here : The Geology Game On YouTube
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