An Educational Game about Pinecones

Learn about pinecones.

Welcome to a 2000s era educational nature program about pinecones, narrated by a famous nature documentary narrator. Absolutely nothing strange going on here.

An homage to 1990s-2000s era educational video games, as well as Planet Earth/nature documentaries. David Attenborough is my hero.

Content Warning

Unsettling imagery and audio.

·········• FEATURES •·········

• Learn about pinecones
• Enjoy 5+ interactive pinecone activities!
• Learn everything you could want to know about pinecones
  
• Accessibility Feature: Click on the checkbox to enable subtitles/closed captioning (no audio descriptions)!
  • If it is enabled in the middle of a voiceline, it will wait for the next voiceline to show the subtitle.

·········•  CREDITS  •·········

• Kimya Taheri - Game Concept/Design, Audio Design
• Ben Hecker - Programming, Game Design
• Media:
  • Background Music: Drivin' from Animal Crossing
  • A few sounds from Freesound.org with some mixing and editing. Images from old Windows XP image archives as well as nature websites for the pinecones.

·········•  INFO  •·········

• Engine: Unity
• Date: September 2024
• Time to Make: 1 Day, plus another day later for creating a subtitle system
• Made For: 1 week rapid prototype project for a studio game class, NYU Game Design

·········•  CONTENT NOTE  •·········

Important note: this game uses a TTS software that recreated Sir David Attenborough's voice. I am strictly against genAI tools for image generation, as well as deepfake technology that ruin people's lives and livelihood. As an artist and occasional voice actress, I take deep offense to its use, especially for commercial, profit-generating purposes. Full disclosure: I marked this game as containing AI because of the tool I used for the voice narration. No other AI was used. 

This assignment was originally made for a project for uni, and was supposed to pay homage to early 2000s educational games, as well as Planet Earth and similar nature documentaries I grew up watching on the BBC, hence why I felt it was necessary for the design of the game to include this voice. The professor also approved its usage since this is an experimental game. I was using it for light-hearted, comedic, non-commercial (you cannot donate to this page), and educational purposes. That being said: if anyone contacts me wanting to take it down for using the likeness of Attenborough, especially if its someone within his circle, I will take the game down out of respect. I'd like to think he'd find this funny, though! :)

·········•  AUTHOR'S NOTE  •·········

Decided to pay homage to the super weird educational games I grew up on in school!

Our prompt involved pinecones so I did research into how pinecones work and what role they play in their tree’s life cycle. It was absolutely fascinating! In the end, I found a lovely video produced by Headspace that summarized the cycle neatly, and used it as the basis for my pinecone descriptions.

I wanted the game to feel simple, similar to how 1990s-2000s educational games felt. These games made up the bulk of my childhood, and while they were fun, they could often be absurd or condescending, with no consistency for difficulty. I wanted to capture that in this game so I wrote all of the voicelines for the narrator/teacher sound condescending and convoluted, even when you get the correct answer. I also made the game overly simplistic and used the background of a Windows XP desktop and the illusion of its UI to capture this old-school feel (I also used its startup and shut down sounds). I thought it would be funny (as this entire game is a bit of a joke) to have the game slowly turn into horror, with the sound effects, music, and narrative slowly devolving and becoming creepier over time. 

Lastly, I wanted to pay homage to the nature documentary genre. I grew up on Sir David Attenborough documentaries on the BBC, and wanted to find a way to incorporate him. I was also inspired by the “PokeEarth” series on YouTube, where a VFX creator has taken to creating realistic documentaries of Pokémon, and he originally began the series by using audio from David Attenborough’s documentaries, with the occasional TTS voice to say Pokémon and other specific words. I didn’t have enough time to clip and splice pieces of voice clips from “The Green Planet” series he did several years ago, so instead I used a TTS voice based on his voice to capture the nature documentary feel. 

Fun Tidbit: Worked with Ben to create a system so I could add subtitles manually! Only realized once I presented my project to the class that none of the international students could understand what was being said, and a handful of native English speakers couldn't understand it either because they weren't used to the British dialect, haha!! 

·········•  KNOWN BUGS  •·········

• made in a few days so anything is possible, lol