Theme: Charactor, Environment and Event
In response to the theme of Charactor, Environment and Event, I made a game using Unity(2019.2.0f1).
By playing this game I introduced to the player about the basic of a Chinese Traditional philosophy theory called Wuxing, which means Five Elements.
About Wuxing (Copy and edit from Wikipedia):
It is a fivefold conceptual scheme that many traditional Chinese fields used to explain a wide array of phenomena, from cosmic cycles to the interaction between internal organs, and from the succession of political regimes to the properties of medicinal drugs. The "Five Phases" are Fire (火 huǒ), Water (水 shuǐ), Wood (木 mù), Metal (金 jīn), and Earth (土 tǔ).
The doctrine of five phases describes two cycles, a generating or creation (生, shēng) cycle, and an overcoming or destruction (剋/克, kè) cycle.
The Generation Cycle is:
The Overcome Cycle is:
Game Introduction:
This is a 2D Single-Player strategy game.
The game world is made with 5 elements, there are 100 cells, 20 per element, and each cell have is own energy, originially is 10. Player control a Spirit started at left bottom corner with 10 energy and the same element with the cell in the left bottom corner. The player can move to cells near by using WASD except the cell the player were stand on just now.
The main concept is to show the cycle of Wuxing by plus and minus in energy. If the player walk on a cell with element that overcome the player's element, the player's energy will minus by the amount of energy this cell have. If it generate the player's element, the player's energy will plus the amount of energy this cell have. The player will also do the same thing to the cells. If either player or cell have a negative amount of energy, it's element will change to the one that overcome it (the one made it negative), and the energy amount will be the negative amount without the minus sign(e.g. Player of Fire element with 10 energy step onto a cell of Water element with 30 energy, player's energy will minus 30 to -20 because Water element overcomes Fire element, then the player have a negative energy (-20), so he will shift to Water element with 20 energy ( -20 without minus sign).
The way to win is became the element that dominates the world, which means the total energy of that element is bigger than half of total energy of all 5 elements. Because player's element is not fixed, you can either try hard with your original element to beat other elements to become the most powerful, or just change your element to join the most powerful element to get big advantage. Either way leads to the same result.
Note:
There is a bug that I didn't find the reason...Sometimes when you press R, It will shows "Earth take over the wolrld!", please just press R again to start a new game to ignore it.
I accidently selected Unity 2019.2.0f1 instead of 2020 vers, I noticed it untill I finished the game...I don't know how to build a MacOS version with Unity2019 so I didn'y build one.
It is still a rapid developed game so I made a very simple UI, I will use icons intead of just colors to indicate the elements if I have time.
Key Binding:
W, A, S, D to move the spirit
R to play again
Esc to quit the game
Refernences:
Source of the png I use for the UI: https://longhealthcare.com.au/health-topics/2019/6/25/five-elements-theory-and-the-applications-in-chinese-medicine
By Deno Zhang
Email Deno Zhang
Published On: 30/04/2020