Nesta VHNC

Nesta is a UK based innovation agency for social good. We partnered with Nesta to help them with one of their current major objectives in the UK, reducing obesity by half in the UK by 2030.

In Ocotober of 2021 Nesta along with InGAME invited Scottish game makes and developers to utilise the potential of video games to address the obesity crisis by pitching and subsquently developing a virtual sandbox. As a part of konglomerate games I got to work on and help win this competition along with one other programmer and artist.

Due to the short time period and small team we all had our fair share of responsibilities. For the initial pitch stage it was important we worked together and were able to research the problem space, create, share and give feedback on ideas and contribute towards the initial pitch. Our idea was a city builder focused around creating food environments to be able to model, affect, and experiment with to allow users to better understand and experiment solutions with. After the initial pitches Konglomerate entered the 8 week rapid development final along with two other companies

During these 8 weeks I had to work and prototype various aspects of our proposed idea which was super exciting as I got to work on gameplay features I had never got to develop at this scale before such as (but not limited to):

  • City Building
  • City Zoning
  • Citywide, zone wide and building specific modifiers
  • Saving and loading custom data through serialisation
  • AI
  • VFX

Find out more about the project here!