Utopia Tower Endgame

Genre VR game

Logo First Look Market - Kaleidoscope 2019
Logo of Devlab 2019 - Kaleidoscope Official Selection
Logo Kaleidoscope Official Selection
Our game Utopia Tower Endgame (WT) is a tower economic simulation and a kind of exploration game, which aims to build an ecosystem that is optimized for earth and inhabitants alike. With climate change and diminishing resources as a background, our game shows a future scenario in which it is useful and helpful to create independent sustainable and collaboratively managed systems and to become increasingly independent of external supply chains or money. The main goal of the game is to build a sustainable and emission-free ecosystem. To make sure that this is not too easy, the player finds themself in a flooded big city. The player now has the task of restoring an old, flooded skyscraper as an independent living space. Thus, the goal of the game is to create a functioning circular economy, completely without raw materials from the outside – ergo, without money. The indicator for this is the dollar, which will be needed less and less, the more independent and sustainable production becomes.
Wide angle concept perspective of Utopia Tower

Factors such as – sustainability and price, CO2 intensive and CO2 poor, renewable and non-renewable, expensive and efficient, recycling and new raw material extraction, resource-saving and less powerful, buying in resources and collecting resources – are weighed against each other and always tug at two ends, so to speak, where it is necessary to find a balanced middle.

The mood of the tower’s inhabitants plays the main role here. After all, the most important resource in this game is people. If the residents feel good, more will come and also do more work. If they do not feel well, fewer people will come, or people will leave.
Here the parameters such as self-fulfillment and consumption, knowledge transfer and distribution, skimming and collaboration are juxtaposed. The inhabitants of the ecosystem find themselves in a post-consumer society (as supply chains as we know them today have broken down). But they remain people, of course, and want first and foremost to live fulfilling lives. Besides parties, seminars and other happenings, the most sustainable form of self-fulfillment is meditation, or getting right with yourself.

A concept art showing a futuristic market in Utopia Tower Endgame

But here, too, one must be careful. Too many “enlightened” residents are also a deterrent for newcomers. These must be introduced slowly to the spiritual teachings. And if you overdo it with meditation, the social fabric can turn into an eco-terrorist cult. At the same time, our game is not about teaching ideological concepts or esoteric teachings, but these parameters are traded with many others and at best give the whole game a wink with a humorous touch.

But as the number of residents grows and the collaborative and sustainable lifestyle increases, so does the research and execution and automation of the economic cycle, so that the residents of the tower can – or must – look after themselves and their spirituality more and more. Here then social management begins to become more important than the economic one, where new cultures and customs arise. Here it is then necessary to find the right (balanced) measure between sufficient free space for the individual and sufficient integration into the social group of the “tower society”. With the human resources that are freed up, an empire of capitalism can of course be created. So the Tower can now also be transformed by the player into a highly efficient production machine, which produces goods for the free market beyond the own Tower with a lot of people power and maximum performance. However, should the player choose this path,they will have to contend with ever-increasing demands and requirements from their Tower inhabitants, which they will find difficult to meet without further ado in the event of the slightest disruptions in supply chains. What can work well for a while will probably end up in revolts, dissatisfaction and migration. Giving in and turning around to a more sustainable way of life will take the player some time: transforming a highly efficient production facility into a sustainable and holistic ecosystem doesn’t happen overnight. But it is possible in some circumstances.

We want to make this game explicitly for the Oculus Quest. In doing so, the construction of the economic system and the population of the tower should proceed in such a way that the user can constantly move around the tower.They can then, if they have collected enough money or resources, build new housing, energy or agricultural units, use the raw materials of old units for new construction projects and thus advance the inhabitants of their tower. Especially through education and meditation, the creativity of the inhabitants is increased and thus always new and surprising buildings are created for the user.

Thus, this game is a joy for every strategy gamer who also wants to try VR once and at the same time a joy for friends of imaginatively designed worlds.
Utopia Tower Endgame is a spin-off from our Future Diaries universe. Just as anticipated with the development of the Storyworld, this is a source for various media derivatives, from which you can act relatively quickly in terms of content development. The fundamental themes of the Storyworld, namely sustainable social and economic systems, post-growth and autonomy against the backdrop of accelerating climate change, have grown very much in ubiquitous presence in the world and the media since the Storyworld was developed 3 years ago. Thus, for us, every development of a single derivative from this story universe is also a further development of the storyworld, which in turn can be helpful for further and future other derivatives from this universe. Thus, with the development of this game, we are expanding and deepening the parameters and fabric around new technologies, economic systems, and bionic developments around the considerations of the Storyworld of the Future Diareis Storyworld.

In the following, we will list the parts of the storyworld that play a role as central components in the development of Utopia Tower Endgame, in order to explain in each case how exactly these parts are to be integrated into the game.