Expedition: Artifact was created by Milo Fisher, Emily Wen, and Sam Fisher and was made for the 2021 Cultural Heritage Game Jam. In this game, the player is an archeologist who is brought to the Petra dig site in Jordan to help solve a variety of problem ranging from environmental concerns, to the prevention of looters from stealing important artifacts. The player starts the game off in an international town home of a world history museum. In the town besides the museum, there is a research center for analyzing artifacts, a store for upgrading equipment, and a mission board for embarking on expeditions. The game has 2 main gameplay features: the missions where the player is fighting through looters and completing objectives, and the research building where the player selects artifacts to be researched and sends completely researched artifacts to the museum. In this game prototype, there are 5 missions to embark on, each with its own unique objective as well as a unique artifact to collect. Upon researching the unique artifacts and sending them to the museum, they show up in the museum building and provide a historical description of the artifact.

On this project, I was the game designer and programmer. Because this game was for a game jam, I had to design according to the rules of the competition:

• Celebrate diverse cultural art, artifacts, traditions, and places

• Help disrupt cultural heritage looting, theft, trafficking, and destruction

• Reinforce the importance of protecting and preserving cultural heritage

• Educate about the effects of climate change on cultural heritage

In order to meet the first requirement, I designed the museum to show off historically important artifacts from Petra that the player finds, where the player can see NPCs that are excited to see the artifacts. For the second requirement, I designed the missions to feature a core gameplay loop of beating up looters that are defacing and destroying the historical site. Some looters even stole artifacts, and upon defeating them, the player can recover the stolen artifact. To meet the third and fourth requirement, I worked with our team's writer to provide mission briefings that highlight the importance of protecting and preserving the land and artifacts at an endangered historical site.

As the programmer for our team, I was tasked with implementing every game feature, so I chose to make our game in Unity. I started out by developing the player controller which utilizes the Unity 2D physics as well as my own handling for the simulated depth. Like Castle Crashers, I utilized a variation of oblique projection to create a sense of depth in 2D. Rather than using the z-axis for depth, the player's y-axis and scale are altered. I implemented a personal ground level for each entity so they can each be affected by gravity, but will not fall below their respective ground height. I used simple sprite sheet animations in conjunction with some particle and coloration effects to handle the entity visuals, and used a canvas for the UI. For the research center, I used the canvas event system to handle the dragging and dropping of items in conjunction with an inventory system I made to keep track of the player's items. I also made the museum which has the same player controller as a mission, but has the added features of interactable museum exhibits and NPCs that roam around and talk to the player when they pass each other.

This was my first game jam I had ever entered (same goes for my teammates). I am used to making projects in short amounts of time, however, I was working on two additional games over in the same 2 weeks because of my classes at UC Santa Cruz. I had designed many more features for this game that cut due to a lack of time to work on them. Originally our game was to cover many historical archeological sites, each with their own uniques scenery, enemies, and artifacts, and missions were supposed to have mini games within them to correspond to the objective, however, these were all reduced to the basics of what our team felt our game's identity was.