Project Planet – Earth vs Humanity
Fifth Harbour StudiosWhat happens when Planet Earth has finally had it with all of Humanity?
We’ve had a lot of fun either trying to destroy Humanity with virus outbreaks, asteroid impacts and other plagues or teaming up as part of the World Leaders, Industry, Media, Scientists and Public, in an attempt to survive and simultaneously gain power.
We were super excited that the team at Fifth Harbour Studios has agreed to share tips and insights into the development of Project Planet: Earth vs Humanity and their use of articy:draft. Here’s what we found out:
Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Fifth Harbour Studios working on Project Planet – Earth vs Humanity
Fifth Harbour Studios: We are Sjors van der Werff and Rik Koning, cofounders of Fifth Harbour Studios. Sjors has a background in animation until the pandemic brought an end to all his existing projects and he happened upon an opportunity to chase his life-long dream of making a game. He asked his highschool friend Rik – who has an education in game design and production, and was working at a large mobile games publisher – to help out, and a few months later Fifth Harbour Studios was founded. The team is completed by Nieck Kelder on the tech side, together with a wide range of freelancers that assisted throughout the game’s development cycle.
Articy: Project Planet is a strategic game in which players can choose to play as Planet Earth and try to destroy Humanity or play as Humanity and attempt to survive. What can you tell us about the origin of the game story, was it inspired by world events?
Fifth Harbour Studios: As the concept was created during the first COVID lockdown, it is definitely inspired by real world events. During the prototyping phase, we started with a Virus Outbreak as the first disaster, and were frequently using real life events to shape the many scenarios throughout this disaster. Later we added additional disasters like Asteroid Impacts, Locust Plagues and Hurricanes, but even here we constantly draw on historic and current real world issues and dynamics to create clear parallels to everyday dilemmas.
Articy: The players are faced with impossible dilemmas and have countless paths ahead. How big of an impact do player choices have on the way the story plays out?
Fifth Harbour Studios: Every single decision that players make has an effect on ingame scores as well as the path humanity takes throughout the disaster. For example, if World Leaders decide to instigate a global lockdown in response to the Virus Outbreak, the Public can decide whether to protest the lockdown or not. If the World Leaders instead decide to keep the economies open, the Industry can decide to donate face masks to keep everyone safe, or increase face mask prices to make a hefty profit. So even if you’re playing the same role in the same disaster, it’s extremely unlikely you will encounter the same scenarios.
Articy: How did you manage to keep track of all the possible branching storylines?
Fifth Harbour Studios: We honestly couldn’t have done it without articy:draft. Visualizing the branching storylines was a necessity to build the kind of complex flows that Project Planet uses, and the Jump nodes were extremely helpful to allow moving between different branches while keeping the potential paths clear for ourselves. For example, if players protest the lockdown and the World Leaders decide to change their mind and end the lockdown, Articy allows us to jump back to the “No lockdown”-branch.
But we would be lying if we said we didn’t spend a good amount of time figuring out all the possible paths of each disaster, even with Articy’s help.
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you need to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
Fifth Harbour Studios: We knew as soon as we started on the digital prototype (we tested our game concept as a simplified written card game first) that we were going to need a tool to visualize all the decision paths. We explored a few options, but quickly decided articy:draft fulfilled all our needs.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Fifth Harbour Studios: The truth is that Project Planet most likely wouldn’t have existed without articy:draft. Eventually, it turned out to be so convenient that Rik (Game Designer) didn’t work inside the Unity engine once, instead setting up all the flows, texts and game balance in articy:draft with Nieck exporting his work to Unity.
Articy: What features of articy:draft did you use the most and how?
Fifth Harbour Studios: With the wide range of storyline branches and over 300,000 words once all six disasters are fully implemented (similar to the first Game of Thrones novel), we obviously used the Flow Fragments the most.
That said, we also used over 20 flow templates, used global variables to set conditions (e.g. “Was the Public evacuated or not?” to determine the asteroid’s impact), set up the entire game balance, and added voiceovers, images and videos through articy:draft, among other things.
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
Fifth Harbour Studios: Get your work out there as soon as possible! Don’t wait until something’s perfect; launch your Steam page and demo, and start interacting with players as soon as you can. Chances are you’ll learn much more about your game in a week of interacting with players, than in months of development. And it’ll help you market your game at the same time!
If you’d like to experience a multiplayer Plague Inc., with Among Us vibes and Jackbox Party Pack controls, or if you simply like to play party games with your friends, check out the free Project Planet demo and add the game to your wishlist if you like it!
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