Tide Up – An Interactive Eco-Adventure for Environmental Awareness

Tide Up is an interactive eco-adventure game that blends engaging gameplay with environmental education. Set on a vibrant island, players take on the role of an environmentalist tasked with cleaning up pollution, restoring nature, and inspiring local communities to adopt sustainable practices. Through exploration, resource collection, and upcycling mechanics, Tide Up demonstrates how individual actions can lead to meaningful environmental change.

Objective

The aim of Tide Up was to create a compelling digital experience that promotes environmental awareness through storytelling and interactive gameplay. The student team set out to combine education with entertainment – edutainment – by embedding real-world ecological challenges such as waste management and ocean pollution into game mechanics that are engaging and accessible.

Players experience firsthand how small actions – like collecting trash, recycling, and upcycling – can have a visible and lasting impact on the environment and the attitudes of others. The project emphasises the message that individual behaviour matters and that sustainable thinking can be fostered through play.

Project steps

The development of Tide Up followed the Scrum framework, with the team working in sprints and holding regular stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives.

• Brainstorming: The project began with an exploration of cosy and wholesome games. These inspirations helped shape the concept of an eco-adventure that balances fun with meaningful environmental themes.
• Design & Development: The team used Unity to create the game world, design characters, and implement mechanics such as trash collection, upcycling, and the NPC Awareness System which visually reflects the player’s impact.
• Testing:
  • A lo-fi prototype revealed issues with clarity.
  • Hi-fi mockup tests highlighted UI strengths and weaknesses.
  • The beta test showed strong engagement with core mechanics but flagged issues that needed to be addressed in polishing.
• Polishing: The team used testing insights to improve clarity, balance, and feedback before presenting the game at the final showcase.

Outcomes

The result of the project is a PC game that illustrates environmental responsibility through a visually rich and interactive world. Players can explore diverse areas of the island, take on quests, upcycle collected materials, and watch as the environment – and its residents – transform in response to their efforts.