Shantytown

Team: Power Stache Productions
Theme: Futuristic Social Stratification
Genre: Adventure
Engine: Half-Life 2
Cohort: Cohort 04, Jun '06

Shantytown is a single player Half-Life 2 conversion made within a five month period. We wanted to design an imagined future reality where the earth has been almost overtaken by a jungle of poisonous mushroom fungus; and humanity has taken refuge in towering vertical cities. As with most adventure games, our challenge was to provide ample player feedback in order to facilitate game play progression. We addressed this by providing in-game feedback by using dialogue from a pop up menu and using in-game characters.

Our story starts on the tenth level of one of these towering cities. As a player, you control the heroine of the story, Ellie, a young inventor and her floating robot companion who follows her around wherever she goes. Ellie's house has come under a deluge of trash from the processing facility above her house. Your mission as Ellie is to stop the trash from raining down upon her roof. Along the way Ellie will talk with city locals to gain a way to save her home.

Team Power Stache Productions is: Cynthia Bell, David Driggers, Ben Jones, Madan Kandula, Derek Manns, Roy Orr, Andreas Papathanasis, Mike Pankratz, Kevin Penrod, Lowell Ponder, Gabriel Sheets, David Vargo, Matthew Weaver, Christopher Willis-Ford, Rance Wood