Plant Simulator

I'm very behind on updates this week so I have a lot to write and will try to make it concise!

Moving on from my last post I had the idea of making a simple sim game prototype based on the idea of a growing plant.

Rules:

• Spend energy to add bits to your plant
• Leaves gather energy (and take a few turns to grow fully)
• Roots gather water
• Leaves need water each turn or they start to wilt/die off
• Stems add space for more leaves
• Environmental factors affect resources (e.g. sun rain that multiply/restrict energy and water, as well as pockets of sunshine/water that give you boosts)
• Later expansion might include more elements: add spikes/stinging leaves to stop predators eating your leaves, add roots with water storage, etc.

I started this with a paper prototype but quickly felt a digital prototype was needed to judge it, as doing the calculations manually with each turn already felt arduous (should that have been a red flag?). Leaving off the environmental aspects to start with, I created the plant building system using simple nodes to attach tiles, and the ability to move time along to collect/use up resources.

There were a lot of questions still to explore:

• How would the player choose what to spend energy on - would they have to choose between a limited selection, or buy a pack at a time? Or just have free choice?
• How should energy work - should there be a cap that the player has to expand? Is it more like a mana bar?
• How much is this about realtime decisions vs a turn-based game? Should positioning of elements be more important? Is this about tile placement or simulation?

Overall I didn't feel that an obvious answer was emerging about how this would turn into meaningful choices for the player.

I added a few more parts to the system to make it less predictable, to try to create more risk/reward in how the player chooses to build:

• Randomised weather each day, changing the chance of sun/water
• Soil dries out over time between rain, creating reduced chance of water being collected
• Wilting/dying of leaves without water based on chance rather than number of turns

But still, looking at my prototype and starting to put together my thoughts about the research I was doing (as I wrote about in the previous update), the direction felt fundamentally wrong. I didn't know what challenge I was trying to give to the player, and how the game would throw new and interesting obstacles in the way. It felt like the natural direction for this concept would be an idle game, and that's not an area I'm looking to work on currently.

So - back to the drawing board.