Econagri– Clean City Tycoon is a game about balancing the careful relationship between progress and ecology. It is about building a city one neighbourhood at a time. It’s about picking 1 out of 3 tiles to lay down on each turn – simple to understand, yet hard to master.

It is a turn-based puzzle game wherein when each tile is laid, the players gain a certain number of points and eventually unlock certain ‘advanced tiles’, which come with certain restrictions and benefits. 

Each tile also has a ‘cost’ – a certain level of AQI that increases for placing that tile. Certain tiles can reduce this AQI cost, but to get those tiles a player has to place a certain number of advanced tiles to reach it. This delicate gameplay of balancing development with rising air pollution mirrors exactly the problem faced by people every day – how to balance people’s wants and needs.

This was a 6 month project wherein the first 3 months of the project were dedicated to creating the 3D artwork for the game and also developing the placeholder mechanics of build, as we tested the game at each step. 

Timelines like any project were crucial but more so in this project since the organisation had already declared a launch date. 

The core team included Game designer Adhiraj Singh, Game Developer Charu Tak, 3D artist Shuhangi Rahega and Project Manager Shubhada Nishtala. Concept art and UI Design  support was rendered by Bakarmax. 

Once the core team was in place, we brainstormed on art styles and how we could make a game that would work smoothly on browsers as well as android.

 We then decided to create art which was minimal and clean. Adhiraj’s brief for the art was, “Something I’d want to eat”. 

We chose to have a static game to keep it compliant with any browser’s capability. An animated game would also mean a longer bug fixing period and more cost, which the client couldn’t commit to at the point. 

Here are some snippets of the WIP and the final art

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The 2D concept art support was provided by Bakarmax 

While the art was W.I.P, we worked on the Alpha build of the game with placeholder assets. The Alpha build is where we make sure that all the elements we want to include in the

rules and mechanics are able to fit and work well together. Charu started the alpha build in conjunction with the art process, coding according to the gameplay and making sure the rules added up. 

 Meanwhile, we also worked on Game UI, logo and background score which would later be included in phase 2- the Beta build. 

Here’s some W.I.P. for the game UI. 

Art was finished by the end of Month 3 and so was the beta build of the game. The beta version is where we put everything – art, UI – together and we polish it so that it gets closer and closer to the final product. Once we started putting all the art together, we noticed a problem. The tiles had some sizing issues wrt to the metro lines and roads causing a distasteful visual experience. This was something that we didn’t see coming and had to be fixed on the go before the bug fixing period ended. Which meant, the team had to come back together and make necessary changes. 

It was also time for 3 months of bug fixing. We had to fix this art problem along with bug fixing. 

The bug fixing period was most challenging since fixing one bug would bring up another one.  This is a common occurrence when the duration of building a game is short and we don’t get enough time for playtesting. Bugs arising out of fixed bugs contributed to some delays in the timeline which resulted in some delays in the launch date. But it is always best to release a bug free game than encounter bugs while the game is LIVE! 

The game is now available to play on Play store (android) and on browser. 

Here’s a small tutorial on how you can play the game: