FLOOD CONTROL by bagyo.app is a free browser game that teaches disaster preparedness through play. It runs on real, open hazard and map data, rewards careful resource management over guesswork, and puts AI agents beside the player the way bagyo.app’s A.E.R.I.S. stands beside Filipinos in a real storm.
Gamified education: rehearse the storm before it comes
The Philippines is hit by more typhoons than almost any other country. Hazard maps and evacuation plans exist, but few people ever sit down with them before the rain starts. A game gives them a reason to.
FLOOD CONTROL grew out of bagyo.app, the Philippine disaster-resilience platform (bagyo is Filipino for typhoon), and its live disaster dashboard at dashboard.bagyo.app. The dashboard helps people report, respond, & react faster during natural disasters. The game lets them practise first.
You play as the decision maker of various Philippine Cities through a season of five escalating storms. The lessons are built into the rules, not into text boxes:
- Early evacuation saves lives. Moving families out early costs money and public trust; waiting fills the map with rooftop rescues at the peak.
- Hazard maps are worth reading. The end-of-storm report shows the real flood map for the places you defended.
- Local government has real levers. You suspend classes, open schools as shelters and declare a state of calamity, the same calls a city makes.
The game loop does the rest. Stars, a rank, Bayanihan rescue chains and a ghost of your best run make you replay a storm to do it better, and every replay is another rehearsal. A storm takes 15 to 25 minutes, short enough for a class period, and it runs free in a browser on a laptop or a phone.
Real-world open data: your streets, your flood zones
Naga City in FLOOD CONTROL is not a made-up map. It is baked from public, open data, so a player from Naga will recognise their own barangay and see it flood where it really floods.
Resource management is critical thinking
FLOOD CONTROL has no right answer to look up. Money, time, boats and public trust are always short, and the forecast is honest but imprecise. Every storm asks the player to weigh evidence and commit.
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Each storm runs in three phases, and each tests a different kind of judgement:
- Prepare: plan under uncertainty. Read a PAGASA-style forecast, then split a fixed budget between dikes, pumps, boats and supplies for The Arc, the city’s evacuation complex. Every peso on a dike is a peso not spent on a boat.
- Respond: triage under pressure. As the typhoon makes landfall, dispatch boats, amphibious trucks, helicopters and medical teams. Wind can ground the helicopters; the river can cut a road. Who goes first?
- Shelter and recover: count the cost. Keep evacuees fed, dry and powered, then read a report of who was saved, who was lost and what it cost.
The rules reward thinking a step ahead. The 30 % Quick Response Fund stays locked until you declare a state of calamity, so you have to judge when a storm is bad enough. The hardest test is Last Boats: a countdown before the storm moves on, with more people waiting than you can possibly reach.
AI agents and disaster resilience
bagyo.app’s bet is that AI agents can make communities more resilient: not by replacing people, but by putting the right information in front of them at the right time. FLOOD CONTROL brings that idea into the game in four ways.
- A.E.R.I.S. in the field. In bagyo.app, A.E.R.I.S. (Autonomous Emergency Response Intel System) is an AI assistant with location-aware help, community incident reports, a hazard map, hotlines and SOS tools. In the game she is your field correspondent, reading the weather and flagging danger. The Disaster Minds™ AI Agent (Minds™ by Animoca Brands) points you to whatever needs you next.
- Advisors as agents. The City DRRMO, Social Welfare, Health Office, Treasurer and DepEd each see only their own area. Each raises decision cards with a deadline and a recommendation, and they can disagree. You stay the one who decides.
- Don’t trust blindly. Our tests found that always accepting the advisors’ recommended option drained public trust from 55 to 26 in a single storm. It is the most important lesson about AI help in a crisis: read the reasoning, then choose.
- AI playtesters and builders. Bots and volunteer developers played whole simulated seasons, again and again, to balance the storms, and AI coding agents helped build the game, its 3D art pipeline and its tools.
Play it, then check your own street
FLOOD CONTROL is free, with no in-app purchases. Play it at play.bagyo.app on a laptop, or on a phone in landscape. Teachers and local disaster offices are welcome to use it in class or in drills.
It is a game, not a hazard advisory. When you’re done, look up your own area’s real flood risk on UP NOAH, and follow live conditions on the bagyo.app disaster dashboard at dashboard.bagyo.app, the project FLOOD CONTROL started from.
FLOOD CONTROL is made by bagyo.app, New Prontera Technologies Corp. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Flood hazard data: UP NOAH Center. Storm names are fictional and not on PAGASA’s lists.
This press release is submitted to BitPinas: We Built a Game That Lets You Rehearse a Typhoon Before It Hits
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