Lumber Tycoon 2

Student Entrant 2016


SCHOOL
University of Maryland
CREATOR
Josh Sheldon

Description

In Lumber Tycoon, it's all about chopping wood and building your lumber empire. Or just a house, wood processing plant, or anything in between. Use axes, sawmills, and trucks to process wood, earn money, and build. Explore and discover new lands with new types of wood, find new tools to use, and optimize your money-making strategies.

Through the entirety of the wood handling process, from chopping down trees, to cutting it in a sawmill, to building with or selling the planks, players have to grapple physically with the lumber to manipulate it into desired positions and orientations. This presents an interesting set of emergent physical challenges to the player, which vary between different randomly generated trees. Players are retained by constantly presenting them unique physics problems to consider as they attempt to move their wood to where it needs to be. With these emergent physical challenges, long-term players often come up with unique creative solutions on how to carry, transport, process, and store their wood in ways never considered by the developer.