Designing a New Zealand Town-Building Game That Actually Feels Like Aotearoa

There is a strange thing that happens when you try to build a game world that feels like New Zealand.

You suddenly notice how many game worlds do not.

The roads feel wrong.

The fences feel wrong.

The buildings feel wrong.

The vegetation feels wrong.

Even when nothing is obviously incorrect, the environment can still feel like it belongs somewhere else.

That has become one of the central design challenges in Country to Coastline, our Aotearoa town-building project.

Aotearoa cannot be reduced to visual symbols

It would be easy to make a generic town-builder and place a kiwi beside the road.

Add a silver fern.

Put a mountain in the distance.

Call it New Zealand.

That is not what we want.

Place is created through hundreds of smaller signals.

A gravel rural road.

Post-and-wire fencing.

A weatherboard home.

A paddock.

A small community building.

A railway stop.

A coastline.

Native vegetation.

The relationship between farmland and town.

The scale of ordinary infrastructure.

These details may not be dramatic individually.

Together, they create recognition.

Everyday New Zealand is part of the identity

Games often represent countries through landmarks.

Landmarks matter, but everyday environments are what people actually inhabit.

The challenge is creating a world where a New Zealand player can recognise something familiar before a giant national symbol explains where they are.

That means paying attention to the ordinary.

It also means accepting regional difference.

Aotearoa is not visually uniform. A Northland landscape is not Central Otago. A coastal settlement does not feel like an inland rural town.

As the project grows, those distinctions can become part of the richness of the game.

Māori culture cannot become environmental decoration

There is a greater responsibility when Māori language, knowledge, places or taonga are involved.

Cultural content cannot simply be treated as an asset pack.

A carved pattern does not automatically create cultural integrity.

A Māori word does not automatically make a mechanic culturally grounded.

Research from Te Kōtahitanga is educational rather than game-design research, but one principle translates powerfully: culture counts. Learning environments work differently when identity, relationships and ways of knowing are treated as meaningful rather than peripheral.

That should challenge game developers too.

Where specialist knowledge is required, consultation matters.

Where a narrative belongs to a particular iwi or hapū, context matters.

Where a design choice could turn something significant into decoration, restraint matters.

Games and play already have deep roots here

Modern digital games are not the beginning of play in Aotearoa.

Harko Brown’s work on ngā taonga tākaro describes ancestral games as multidimensional social and educational tools connected to people, place and environment.

That is an important reminder.

When we talk about “game-based learning” in New Zealand, we should not assume the history starts with computers.

Play has long carried knowledge, relationships, challenge, physical skill and cultural meaning.

A digital game from Aotearoa can be contemporary without behaving as though local traditions of play never existed.

The game still has to be fun

Cultural care does not remove the basic requirement of game design.

Country to Coastline still has to work as a game.

Players need goals.

Progression needs to feel satisfying.

Building decisions need consequences.

The economy needs to make sense.

The world needs enough surprise and reward to keep people interested.

Authenticity cannot become an excuse for boring design.

And entertainment cannot become an excuse for careless representation.

Both standards have to exist at the same time.

The goal is a world that could only have been made here

The long-term standard is simple to describe and difficult to achieve:

Country to Coastline should feel like a game that could only have come from Aotearoa.

Not because the interface repeatedly tells you where you are.

Because the world itself does.

That will take iteration.

It will take research.

It will take relationships.

It will take changing things we thought were finished.

And as the game moves into areas requiring deeper cultural knowledge, it will require people with the authority and expertise to help us get those parts right.

That is not a constraint on creativity.

It is part of making something worth creating.