A game to raise awareness of shark fin removal
Team
- Arim Yoon: Artist
- Kirsten Rispin: Sound Designer
- Stephanie Fawaz: Programmer
- Adam Liss: Designer / Programmer
- Brentt Kasmiskie: Designer / Video Production
Game
In The Fin, you play as a shark swimming in the ocean. Using the arrow pad on a keyboard, you can swim through the sea eating various kinds of fish and collecting points. As you swim, more and more boats will appear at the surface of the water, and eventually one of the fish you eat will turn out to be a lure for a finning boat, and you are captured for fin harvesting. You are then thrown back into the ocean with your fins gone, and unable to swim forward any more. We intended the gameplay to show players the brutality of shark finning and the way that it takes away the ability of a shark to swim and survive.
Background
The Games for Change Festival, or G4C Festival, is a conference dedicated to games whose purpose is to educate and inspire social change. Games can be submitted to the festival and judged for display at the conference showcase. Our team discovered the G4C Festival very close to its submission deadline, so we worked over the course of just three days to create a game that brought to light the dangers and impact of shark finning with our game, The Fin.
My Role
I worked as the gameplay programmer of the team. I coded the shark physics and movement in Unity3D, using the arrow keys to propel you forward and change your angular direction forward. I also wrote the code that allowed the player shark to collect/eat fish and keep track of how many had been eaten through a points system.