Dion Peek | Game Designer & Artist

Having played lots of serious games, I realized before making my own that almost all of them I found rather boring. Along with this, when including a game's impact, I truly believe that the best "serious" game is in fact an entertainment game.

With these starting thoughts I started work on Gaslit. As part of a team of 5 developers we developed a game in which the player plays as mother nature, fighting back against the fossil industry. The player does this by puzzling landscapes together, and helping communities by improving said landscapes. Together with these communities, the player can stop the growth of the LNG pumps and factories by various means of protest.

Players connect communities and area upgraders with various randomly generated tile shapes to get protestors and remove fog. This dynamic puzzle would be very difficult if fully random, which is why I got the idea to slightly bias the tiles to be able to connect and finish your last area every now and then.

Having players build their own landscape and communities, to then having it get destroyed was such a simple yet powerful idea I'm really proud of.

As the gas industry slowly starts to consume, the player sees the core individual parts of the whole system.

As the game goes on and the area becomes really large, more and more gas pumps and LNG terminals start to appear. This juggling act in the "late game" is where it starts to become rather tense, as protestors run out and more and more communities start get attacked.

With feedback from our client Fossielvrij NL, we were able to distill a complex problem down to its essentials: the struggle between the reckless capitalist drive to earn money & expand, and the nature & people that have to fight back as to not succumb.

In case you want to play, check it out here!
In case you want to see some praise by Joost Vervoort, check it out here!!

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