Wildlife Conservation — a visual novel where every choice shapes ecosystem balance.

The game began with a question we couldn't put down: what does it mean to be the person who arrives at a place with the authority to protect it, when the people already there did not ask for that protection? You have just arrived at the reserve. The reports are already on your desk — poachers working the eastern fence, farmers pushing into protected land, a community that isn't sure you should be trusted, and politicians whose support comes with conditions.

We looked into the lived texture of community-based conservation in West Africa — the negotiations, the donor pressure, the slow erosion of trust when an institution behaves as if it knows better. We wanted a setting literal enough to be playable in fifteen minutes and dense enough to carry the weight of a real policy problem.

The reserve emerged as the central space because of its dual valence: a place of beauty held together by labour that is rarely beautiful — fences, patrols, paperwork, negotiations after dark. The setting is ecological in scale and domestic in stakes.

Six characters are introduced before the first choice. Alex Koffi, the player character and reserve ecologist. The Chief, village leader and anchor of community trust. The Patrol Leader, who carries field enforcement. The Villagers, a collective trust stat with a face. The Boss, who is institutional support made personal. The Donor, whose funding always arrives with conditions. Each one is a pressure already bearing down on the reserve before the player makes a single decision.

This is the procedural argument of the game: what you don't see is the cost of what you chose. The branching structure is not a menu of content — it is the system telling you, in the only way a game can, that every protective gesture is also an exclusion.

Playtesting happened with Graduate Assistants, Peers, and Ball State Undergraduates. The most useful finding wasn't a bug — it was that players felt responsible for choices they had consciously made. Not because the game told them to, but because the branching structure makes complicity impossible to attribute to chance. You chose. The bar moved.

The ludonarrative harmony comes from consequence. The mechanics don't describe the tension between protection and survival. They reproduce it. By the end of a run, players spoke about the reserve the way you speak about a place you are responsible for — with hedging, with trade-offs, with an awareness that the next decision will cost something they can't yet name.