EnerCities
Enercities is an online game in which players are challenged to build a sustainable city. It runs on EnerCities.eu and on Facebook, and is available in six European languages. The game starts with a small town, and challenges the player to grow the city to a sustainable metropolis.
The project is funded by the Intelligent Energy program of the European Commission, and aims to improve the awareness of energy issues among young people. It will be rolled out by the project partners on schools in the UK, Netherlands, Slovenia, Greece, Germany and Spain.
Paladin is responsible for development of the game and the online community platform.
With over 400 million users, Facebook proves to be an excellent platform for games, both for education and entertainment. Although EnerCities was not designed primarily for social networks, the game has several social features such as a Friend-based highscore and “Post To Wall” option. This accelerates viral spread of the game and improves player engagement.
Rock-Paper-Scissors
The game starts with a small village and a bit of land to build on. There is a simple drag-and-drop interface, with which players can build structures and expand their city. They then need to balance People, Planet and Profit – all while supplying the growing city with sufficient electricity and minimizing fossil fuel use. When done well, players can level up their city, providing them with more room to build and extra building options.
Rollout
The Enercities project will be implemented in 50 European education institutions, and is available in six languages. An online community and group competitions on local and European levels will stimulate team work and strengthen the goal of energy awareness.
After the release of the game, Paladin will continue to support the game with client-side updates and hosting.
Consortium
ROC Nijmegen – Coordinator
Qeam – Initiator, impact research
Paladin Studios – Game developer
Lancaster & Morecambe College – Marketing, Rollout
Akademie Klausenhof – Rollout
Unified Vocational Training Centre Of Cyclades – Rollout
Ljudska Univerza Velenje – Rollout, Toolbox
Agencia de la Energía de Granada – Rollout, energy parameters
Development Facts
EnerCities has been worked on throughout most of 2009. The initial proposal was sent out in 2007, and the project remains active until 2011. This makes it by far the biggest game Paladin has ever released.
We used Scrum to manage the development process. The project has had 14 iterations up to the release of version 1.0.
The entire project has a budget of €1.4M, of which 75% is funded by the European Commission under the IEEA2007 program.
Technical Facts
The game is hosted on a virtual server at Amazon Web Services. We made three prototypes of the game before we settled on the final version, which resembles a board game rather than a simulation.
We used Unity3D as the primary client development tool. Other tools are HTML/Ajax, PHP and MySQL.
