Seedcraft
Released
We continue prototyping games at Indoor Sunglasses, this time with the focus on plant growth and plant mutations. As we did the last time with Feed the Forest, we joined a gamejam - One Game a Month #56 and started designing, prototyping. This time around we’re a lot more focused on prototyping, and we’re also doubling down on some tips given by Jonas Tyroller in his video This Problem Changes Your Perspective On Game Dev.
We initially spent quite a lot of time trying to come up with ideas before jumping on prototyping. We really wanted to see if we could achieve a satisfying tower defense experience in a 2D environment with oddly shaped plants. Additionally, we were wrapping up Feed the Forest which would get us sidetracked quite a few times.
Either way, after we’ve decided on what to make, I first jumped on the core mechanic, while Victor started designing initial gameplay systems and Andres sketching out some visuals…
Once we had a somewhat working growth system, we implemented basic TD stuff, UI and enemies. To spice things up, we decided to add some basic economy systems and adjacency requirements for the plants. Oh and also, we decided that the game takes place in a Gas giant, which would allow us placing plants anywhere in the sky and also enable some funky alien designs (also we geeked out a bit on the idea of gas giants).
Once the prototype was up and running, well… it wasn’t that fun. Due to the weird shapes of the plants routing enemies was kinda weird. Economy also didn’t work that well as adjacency requirements were hard to get right as the plants were constantly moving around. So we decided to scrap TD and simply make a chill toy where you just customize and grow plants (the current version had pre-defined plant seeds).
Turns out physics is kinda jank. Majority of the time we could get it to run quite stable with impressive results, but since the players customize the plants - getting into a janky situation was very easy. We’d need to set quite a few limitations or implement additional systems to avoid this…
Also, performance was starting to bite our ass as well… so, we scrapped physics too :( Additionally, we decided to go 2D (billboards) for the plants, but keep some 3D elements, such as THE CAT (you can experience more cat in Andres Facinated Creature made by Andres) which was our “central core which you have to defend” in the TD version.
I think we nailed the aesthetic and the growth mechanic customization, however the vibes for a chill toy are off and too cold. We also didn’t get ANY feedback from the jam this time around >.> Given the many interruptions, pivots and prototypes we went through, I’m still quite happy with the result, and especially the chance to try out so many things in such a short period of time.
We’re certain now that tower defense with plants is a no-go so now we’ll try different genres (you probably could make it work, but for us, it just doesn’t click). We will also skip joining jams, as the pressure to produce a product quickly prevents us from focusing solely on prototyping, also finding active jams to join is kinda hard it turns out.
Anyway, I kinda wanted to vent somewhere so I made this project page a lot bigger than the rest. So now, PLEASE GO AND PLAY Seedcraft, and leave some feedback on: itch.io