Introduction
Cinder Ridge is a cozy game about tending to California’s forests. The game is set in the near future, after drought, floods, and wildfires exacerbated by climate change have radically altered the landscape.Players take on the role of a new recruit working at a rewilding camp in the mountains, and must make decisions about how best to tend to the woods. The player and their crew work together to manage and restore the forest; planting trees, building trails, clearing firebreaks, tearing up pavement, and more. It’s a roleplaying game that celebrates the personal and social experience of being in nature together. Players can accomplish many tasks on their own, but it’s usually easier, faster, and more fun to work together with the other characters.
Background
At the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, I moved back to my hometown in Grass Valley, California. After evacuating during the Jones Bar fire in summer of 2020, I began to think about making some kind of portrait of the woods around my hometown. After finishing work on Fire Underground (which was concerned with history, cultural memory, and resource extraction), I was interested in making a game that uses a more future-oriented fantasy to explore similar themes about labor and ecology.In 2022, my partner and I founded Understory Games to support work on the game full time. Together we led a small team of artists and engineers to develop the game. Sadly, we have had to put the project on haitus for now.
roles:
- director
-
programmer
-
animator
- designer
tools:
- unity
- blender
- photoshop
- c#