Inspiration

We got tired of reading depressing headlines about the climate crisis and feeling helpless. We wanted to turn that anxiety into agency. We thought, “What if Mother Nature could actually punch back?” We wanted to gamify the conflict between sustainable growth and corporate greed, showing both sides of the coin in a competitive setting that might actually teach people something along the way.

What it does

Eco-nomy is a 2-player digital board game that’s a tactical tug-of-war. One player is Team Forest (trying to save the world), and the other is Team Industry (trying to exploit it).

The Core Loop: Team Forest builds towers to generate Green Points, while Team Industry builds towers to generate Gold.

The Twist: It’s all about patterns. If you manage to build three towers in a straight line, you trigger a combo that massively boosts your own resources while actively tanking your opponent’s score.

The Goal: The game runs on a strict turn limit. When time runs out, whoever managed to balance aggressive expansion with defensive blocking wins the war for Earth.

How we built it

We used Godot to handle the board state, turn logic, and pattern recognition systems. For the visuals, we used Piskel to hand-craft every tower and tile, aiming for a charming board game aesthetic

Challenges we ran into

Balancing the pattern mechanic was tough. We had to make sure that getting a combo felt rewarding but didn’t just instantly end the game for the other player. We also had some late nights debugging the pattern detection logic for a while, the game thought everything was a straight line.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We successfully turned a complex real-world issue into a playable, competitive strategy game. We’re really proud of the “combo” mechanic, it adds a layer of depth where you have to decide between building your own engine or blocking your opponent’s.

What we learned

We learned that game balance is just as fragile as a real ecosystem. We also discovered that implementing drag and drop is much more chaotic than we thought. It turns out moving digital trees around is sometimes harder than planting real ones.

TODO(): Validate this later

What’s next for Eco-Nomy

Next, we want to introduce a card system to shake up the standard tower placement. Imagine drawing special effect cards like “Forest Burn” for Industry to clear the board, or “Rapid Reforestation” for Team Forest to instantly block a combo. It would add a whole new layer of glorious chaos to the grid.