Family Farmer

The Family Farmer is an interactive documentary game accompanying the feature length film “The Family Farm”, by director Ari Cohen. The game challenges visitors to create and manage their own virtual farm while raising awareness on the issues specific to family farms in the process. The reality is that there are fewer and fewer of them in Canada. The game presents the daily reality of farmers by addressing topics such as crop selection, pollution, financing and food distribution in a board game setting using a playful and simple interface.

Art Direction, Illustration, UI/UX

Goals

Synthesize the director’s content into a short experience (less than 5 minutes) demonstrating key issues pertaining to family farming. The interactive is a parallel experience to the documentary.

Developing a playful environment that is reminiscent of board games including amusing illustrations and a rurally-inspired colour scheme.

Development

I came into this project after the preliminary designs had been laid out. Respecting the design guidelines, I helped build an interface, visualizations for the game data and participated in the creation of design assets (illustrated content such as animals, plants, farm equipments and series of playing cards).

Challenges

As my colleagues, fellow Art Director and Developer, and I were building the game play, we realized that the goal for the player wasn’t obscure. Ultimately, it was to run a successful farm, but the true goal was to understand the difficulties associated with farm living. We decided to limit the experience to 13 actions. The player could try to play the game multiple times and still live different realities that family farmers are facing today.

What followed was the challenge of creating a proper randomized experience initiated by the spin wheel. Let’s say a little trickery and random number generator coding fairy dust.