Nomad, Inc.

Nomad, Inc. is a web-based multiplayer pixel art game that uses satire to speculate the impact of rising sea levels on corporations. 

At its core, it’s a game where players navigate rising sea levels as employees of a company that needs to constantly relocate due to environmental challenges.

NASA JPL’s sea level data was incorporated to inform the game world’s flooding, ensuring its compressed timeline closely matches the real world effects and projections of climate change.

Project submitted for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) x Garage Sories competition. 

Award Received: Second Place Winner of Entire Competition

  • Reaching consensus on a game design and user experience that reflected our team’s values: interactive, educational, data-centric, emotional, immersive, accessible.

  • Landing on a simple yet unexpected narrative: make the game play from the corporate perspective instead of the average citizen’s.

  • Combining robust data with a fresh perspective and playful experience is powerful.

Role: Experience Designer; UX Researcher; Storyteller; Producer; Project Manager (three-person team)

Tools: NASA JPL Data; Code; Figma; Illustrator; Blender; Unity

Year: 2023

We shifted the focus of a very real problem (climate migration) to corporate entities instead of the average citizen, in order to raise awareness of the broad impact a warming planet will have, and highlight the need for collective action at the corporate level to realistically mitigate it.

Using NASA JPL and NOAA data, we built a proof-of-concept for a system of equations modeling the production and behavior of atmospheric carbon.

The same way that unity or unreal physics engine calculates the effect of gravity on a character, the Carbon Engine calculates the effect of greenhouse gases on the game world.

Every change made to an in-game company will have a calculable effect on its net carbon footprint and profit margins. All that data will be available and shareable on the company leaderboards from players desktops.

Players will be able to share with a wide audience how their company evolves to improve the world.