A week or so ago we highlighted the game Ayiti: The Cost of Life that puts players in the place of a family trying to make a living in Haiti. Well, I've just come across another game, this time called Village: Play the World of Social Enterprise. Though the game is in production and there's no demo yet (so you can't play!) I'm interested in seeing how this one turns out. If anyone else knows of other games like Village and Ayiti, let me know. I'm trying to either come up with an article on this or at the very least a good overview for this blog.

More on Village:

Village the Game is an early stage startup founded this past May by Darian Hickman. Our mission is to promote awareness of social enterprise (eradicating poverty through profits) and to get more people involved in third world development. We got press way earlier than expected on WorldChanging.com, NextBillion.net, WorldBank.org and several blogs, so we are targeting January 2007 to release an alpha of Village and get some real world feedback. Game demo design is complete. The first round of 2D concept art for buildings is complete, but we can change to make sure it matches well with other level art. Also, VillagetheGame.com website, a Village collectible card game, and the RTS demo are all under development right now.

Fully developed, Village is a multiplayer real-time strategy game for the PC that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the third world.

We need help with finalizing the style of human characters, the style of terrain, and style of buildings, etc within this game. Right now we're going for a more cartoony look than realistic, because quite frankly most RTS games that go for realistic don't have enough personality. The map, characters, and other objects need to look distinct similar to Warcraft II or III. Games like SimCity have really realistic-looking buildings but are easy to get confused. Regarding size of maps, characters, objects expect all the same proportions as Warcraft II. In fact our current placeholder map is something I hacked together in the Warcraft II map editor and replaced the W2 buildings with our current buildings. Also the layout of the HUD, mini-map, and menus will mirror Warcraft II to a large degree.

Sighted at CharityBlog.