A Season Of Fire

The end result of a 10 week long summer internship, A Season Of Fire was a co-op tabletop forest firefighting game that aimed to help teach it's players on forest fires. When starting the project, the team had to find an organization of some kind to potentially pitch the game to. This presented an interesting opportunity to tailor make the game to our organizations needs and have that inform the design decisions within. With that in mind, the team opted to make the game for CIFFC (Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre) (PLEASE NOTE: No direct contact was made with CIFFC).

From their, I aided in creating an engaging co-op multiplayer experience. I helped in ensuring that the games mechanics accurately portrayed the reality of dealing with forest fires and how it is more based on the prevention of them rather than extinguishing of them. The process of fine tuning these mechanics required a large sum of rapid prototypes, internal, and external testing of which all members took part in. In particular, a switch from a competitive co-op style of gameplay to pure co-op game play. This change was not made lightly and required a lot of careful planning and design thinking to ensure the game retained it's quality.

Additional deliberation was taken in regard to the core gameplay and the intended target audience. The game was primarily focused on a younger audience around 10+ years old, and as such had to be at an appropriate level of complexity to ensure that they would fully understand the rules. However, the team also wanted to focus on a more mature audience as well as handling the game content in a mature and accurate way. This posed an interesting dichotomy where the writing had to be clear, concise, and appropriate for younger players, while simultaneously having depth of rules and honesty in regard to the games message. As such, this meant I had to be very deliberate with my word choice and how I conveyed information in the games rulebook.