The red soil of Africa is the background of countless unspoken pains.

A civil war in Somalia broke out in the 1980s, and conflicts continued for many years. Due to war and droughts, uncultivated fields create famines, and many Somalians have to leave their country in the hope of a new life in Kenya. But this neighboring country is unwilling to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the world's largest refugee camps begin to form on the border; Dadaab, Ifo, Hagader…

You can see these camps on Google Maps;

https://goo.gl/maps/uD3Qsc4dEWq3jCdh6

https://goo.gl/maps/bMRiZJ8s4K2ZGrjx5

https://goo.gl/maps/RSWkVTvDY5AnFyCLA


In developing the Building Hope, first of all, we start with the Red Soil scenario.

Three maps will be in that scenario like the real versions; their mechanics will be the same;

Thirsty will be a general problem in Red Soil maps, and consumption will be higher than in other scenarios. On the other hand, groundwaters will be scarce, so wells are not enough options.

Sandstorms will be expected. This makes aids unavailable from time to time; no food, water, or medicine could be delivered to camp in the sandstorms. The camp manager (player) must be prepared for these unexpected difficulties.

Some huge refugee convoys will come to the camp because of increasing conflicts (you can follow the newspaper in the game). Massive participation can easily break the balance of resource distribution-consumption balance in the camp.

That's enough for today. For your opinions and contributions, join our community in Discord;

https://discord.gg/kDwWGk8JRJ

All passionate game studios have a long gamer history in their background. Their disappointments as a gamer about games motivate them to create better ones, their gaming experiences become the elements of their project, and other gamers' contributions guide them in the jungle of the development process, but in the beginning, there is only a passion. In gyroscoping games, our passion is city-builder games.

In 2019 as a newly gathered team who wanted to create a city-builder game, we were in search of a touching theme. The news about refugee convoys who fled the Syrian civil war and came to Turkey was on all channels. Arguing about the building and economic sustainability of refugee camps was very common. At this point, we decided to take a risk and start to use a "building refugee camp" theme.

Because of the subject's sensitivity, the project went through a long preparation process. In mid-2020, we started to code to create an Alpha version of Building Hope in the Unity 3D game engine. Looking at it now, we feel some embarrassment about screenshots of the Alpha version :)


One of the critical points of Building Hope is to give players a sense of the difficulty of living conditions at refugee camps caused by environmental conditions. Fulfilling their basic needs is an easy and mostly overlooked/ignored issue for those who live in the developed settlements just like us. However, even reaching the access to food and clean water could be really hard in the refugee camps because of extreme hot and cold climate conditions. For this aim, we switched the project to Unreal Engine, which is one of the critical turning points of the project. (We don't want to start another phase of the famous "which game engine is better" discussion :) )

At this point, we were satisfied with the results. It's heartening to see the progress of Building Hope, and your opinions and contributions are significant to us.

Join us on this journey by joining our Discord;

https://discord.gg/kDwWGk8JRJ