About Nevergreen
A gloomy day in the office turns into a very long night after a higher-up at a very big company gets rained in due to a big storm outside. A mysterious stranger visits the higher-up in the night, leaving him a flash drive containing a digital card game to play to help pass the time. With nothing better to do, the higher-up inserts the flash drive into his computer and opens Project Nevergreen on his computer, a deck-building roguelike, and battles against nature’s strongest elements.
Nevergreen is a roguelike deckbuilding game focused on card combat. There are various ways to construct and use your deck to take on nature.
Nevergreen is a commentary on how the consumption of resources by corporations is slowly killing the Earth as many of these resources are finite. There is an overlapping commentary on greenwashing which is the deceptive practice of making misleading claims about the environmental benefits of a product, service, or company to create a false impression of environmental responsibility. We hope this game can make players understand the consequences of overconsumption as well as how "environmental responsibility" is often overshadowed and overlooked in the name of profiteering.
This project was made by Two Weeks Studios (a group of 14 people) using Unity as a part of IndieCade's 2025 Climate Jam.
My Role as a Producer:
The Origional Idea and Forming a Team:
As a big fan of Inscryption, I really wanted to work on a Rogue-like narrative based card game. Thus, I created a written draft with the base idea including some ideas for gameplay, narrative, and art. In doing so, I was able to form one of the largest, and most passionate, groups of the game jam. A group of 14 people all inspired by the same idea.
Coordinating with the Team:
After forming Two Weeks Studios, I used discord to organize our team into groups based on skills and interests. I then led the initial full department meetings, and programming meetings, and encouraged the departments that I was not a part of to begin holding their own sessions.
My Role as a Designer:
Gameplay:
The hardest part of the design process for this game was deciding how card gameplay should work. We really wanted the gameplay of Nevergreen to have well developed meaning, and thus used multiple meanings debating the best method for gameplay. This led us to being behind schedule early on in the design process. Ultimately I am happy with our gameplay mechanics, but it was not worth the amount of time we spend on it. Thus, I have learned a lot from this experience about how to best manage time in the beginning stages of game design.
Card Types:
In relation to the Climate Jam theme of Natural and Unnatural Disasters, we focused our card designs on choices people make that have large environmental impacts (for the player's deck) and the effects that these choices have (for the enemies deck). Thus, there are 3 main card types: nature cards, industry cards, and disaster cards. Nature cards appear in both the player and enemy decks and include things like lumber, rocks, wolves, and cattle. They can be played using 'sapling points' that acts as the base currency for the player. Industry cards only appear in the player deck, and includes things like steel factories. Unlike nature cards, these cards can only be played by sacrificing nature cards. Finally, disaster cards only appear in the enemy deck, and include things like floods and forest fires. These cards have their own currency invisible to the player but can only be played after a certain number of nature cards are sacrificed or die.
My Role as a Programmer:
Enemy AI:
The largest thing that I programmed was the EnemyAI. Using Unity, I wrote code for an advanced AI system that can play cards based on what move would be best based on the hand that they have, and based on the cards placed on the board by the player. The AI chooses which spots to place a card by checking the player's board for cards that it can oppose.
Tutorial:
As a final touch to our project, I coded a short cutscene using art assets created by the art team and inlcuding some basic instructions on how to play the game.
My Role in Narrative Design:
Relation to Climate Jam Theme:
This game is about a higher-up in a big company slowly learning the impacts his businesses habits have on the environment and natural disasters. To get this story across, I helped write dialogue for the Tutorial, and advocate for the narrative concepts we were trying to build in ideating features of the game including card types, and art styles.