Development: 3 weeks
Team: 5 students, 4th semester HTW Berlin Game design
Software: Maya, Unity, Rider
Plattform: PC
Theme: Change
Looking Back is a single-player experience where players inherit a small settlement and strategically allocate resources—energy, water, industry, nature, and leisure—to shape its growth, population, and ecological balance.
Developed in a three-week experimental game jam, the project leverages procedural systems and the Marching Cubes algorithm to create a thought-provoking exploration of change. Players build and make decisions that ripple through time, ultimately choosing whether to accept the future or reshape it, embodying the game’s central theme: shaping tomorrow through deliberate action today.
The save system was necessary because it provided two main benefits: players could save their own creations, and we as developers could offer campaign levels.
The data is encoded using structs within structs. As expected, decoding is a bit trickier, but entirely manageable. Writing save systems is definitely an important task.
I offered four game modes: Campaign, Quick Play, Build Mode, and Developer.
We worked in a hybrid setup, with some team members working remotely due to COVID while others, including myself, were on site.
Our main goal during this three-week game jam was to avoid crunch, especially since we also had coursework for other subjects running in parallel.
As always, we relied heavily on Miro.com for collaboration, and it was very rewarding to see teammates using the tools and workflows I had set up and explained.
Our team consisted of five members—Janina, Farshid, Victor, Finja, and myself. Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, we managed to maintain strong communication