Liberty Landing

Liberty Landing is a 2D top-down pixel-art RPG (role-playing-game) about exploring and learning about civic duties, responsibilities, and constitutional rights as an American citizen. Similar to games like Google Doodle’s Island Champion, players can explore the town of Liberty Landing and participate in a series of minigames about the U.S. Constitution, community service, American history, and staying up-to-date on current events. Additionally, interactable NPCs (non-player-characters) located throughout Liberty Landing teach the player civics knowledge required to complete select minigames (e.g. the school matching minigame). Players beat the game upon completing all of the minigames on their in-game checklist.

The game consists of four total minigames: a history-themed matching game set in the schoolhouse, a “Run to the Mayor” side-scrolling platformer in the town square, a trash pick-up game in the community park, and a jury duty simulator game at the local courthouse. The matching game tests the player's knowledge about civics and history content provided through NPC dialogue. In the platformer, similar to Google's Dinosaur Game, players inform fellow citizens about the upcoming mayoral election on their way to attend election speeches. The park clean-up minigame teaches players about serving the community by cleaning up litter and recycling when possible. In the jury duty simulator, players serve on a jury and are presented with five court cases. Using laws granted by amendments to the Constitution, players have to decide whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. 

Research used throughout the game to inform players about civics was primarily sourced from the Library of Congress’s digital catalog. For example, the information regarding American civic duties and responsibilities were predominantly procured from Frank Arthur Vanderlip’s Opportunities and Responsibilities of Citizenship, published by the National City Bank of New York. Direct information from the U.S. Constitution was also supplemented throughout the game in various places such as the courthouse minigame. Other resources from the National Archives and Records Administration were also referenced in the final game. 

In addition to being fun and informative, our game has many features to increase accessibility for all! Liberty Landing is compatible with modern screen readers and complete with an option to enable Text-to-Speech, which will read all displayed text out loud and notify players of in-game collisions and possible in-game interactions! Highly customizable display settings are also available to aid visual impaired players. Players have the freedom to manipulate the game’s brightness, contrast, and color saturation to suit their needs and preferences. 

Liberty Landing by YGDA, including all assets and code, are placed under an MIT License.

Source code is available at https://github.com/ygda-org/civics-game