Designing We Are The Caretakers out this week on Xbox

Hey, I’m Scott, Design Director at Heart Shaped Games, and I had the opportunity to share about the unique design process behind our new sci-fi grand strategy RPG. We are the caretakers. A lot has been invested during the game’s 4+ years of development, but I want to focus on how our design team discovered fun and novel strategy gameplay mechanics from a very unlikely source: endangered animal poaching and real-world animal welfare work.

inspirations and ideas

I’ve always wanted to make a great strategy game with a large roster of characters to organize and level up, similar to games like Xcom, Darkest dungeonor my personal absolute favourite, the classic Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen. I had previously worked on concepts and prototypes in the grand strategy genre for many years, but finally felt the right time to revisit these designs after our team was approached to create a game about poacher tracking and management.

At first this seemed like an odd topic to build a game around, but after spending time with real researchers and rangers working in the field protecting endangered animals, we were inspired. Her incredible work led us on a journey of discovery about the realities of human-animal conflict and animal welfare. Rangers work in small teams with limited resources, tracking animals and poachers moving in unpredictable patterns across vast spaces. This unique management challenge led to interesting gameplay choices and fitted perfectly with the squad building and large roster management RPGs we loved. We quickly realized that we had something innovative and special in front of us and got to work.

Bend genres and create new gameplay

Our solution to translate this research into a game was to mix a variety of game genres, each emulating an important aspect of wildlife conservation. We’ve designed a Caretaker HQ where you organize your hundreds of recruited characters into squads, deal with imprisoned poachers, and upgrade your tech before setting off. We created a real-time map exploration system with pauses where you use your squads to look for poaching activity. And we’ve designed a turn-based combat system to resolve encounters between your squads and poaching teams, giving you diplomatic options in addition to traditional JRPG-like abilities.

By giving players action at a macro and micro level throughout our campaign with over 30 missions, players will experience what it’s like to assemble an organization that can fight back.

build a world

While gameplay design was a long process of discovery, we put just as much effort into creating an exciting world and style that fits the gameplay. Art director Anthony “robotpencil” Jones found inspiration in Afrofuturist works such as Black Panther for the environment and character designs; Composer Jon Parra has infused a stunning orchestral score with inspiration from rap beats; and Narrative Designer Xalavier Nelson, Jr. reinforced the real-world stories with the addition of alien close encounters and a post-apocalyptic planetary redemption storyline.

lessons learned

The Greatest Lesson Learned Making We are the caretakers was that looking beyond traditional genres and gameplay tropes is the path to new and original ideas. By bringing in collaborators from outside the games industry and building a diverse development team, we’ve ensured we have a variety of perspectives that can find the right solution and create something exciting and fresh for our players. Keep working with the Heart Shaped Games team We are the caretakers has been one of my greatest professional joys and I hope that shows in the last game you play.

We hope you like it We are the caretakers as much as we do. It’s available to pre-order today and launches Friday, January 6th! Your purchase also supports the people who inspired the game by donating 10% of net proceeds from the game to the Wildlife Conservation Network’s Rhino Recovery Fund.