Tile Placement Version
At the start of this week I wanted to come back to the plant theme from a different angle. From research and speaking to people I concluded that a tile placement game would be a simpler place for me to start in learning about designing strategy games.
I made another paper proto, quickly moving into Illustrator and Google Sheets, focused on the simple mechanic of creating and completing segments of a vine, then scoring based on the objects attached to the vine. This is based on ideas from a few different sources:
- Kodama - building and scoring branches with objects attached
- Dorfomantik - growing areas to get a bigger score but (sometimes) also having to close them off to meet the goal
- Islanders (to a lesser extent) - scoring objects based on their proximity to others, some with negative impacts
The first objects for the plant game score as follows:
- Fruit - 5 points
- Tendrils - 2 points
- Leaves - first leaf scores 1, the second 2, etc
- Buds - no score, but if you place in a sunshine spot, it blooms into a flower and scores 10 (more sunshine spots appear throughout the game)
- Aphid/bug - eats *all* the leaves in the section
- Wasp - destroys a fruit on the section
This felt easy to expand on with more conflicting items, and I also mixed missions into later iterations, such as complete a segment with one of each object, or with x leaves, or bloom 3 more flowers, etc. The reward for this would be a tile with a special power-up, such as a bird that can be placed on an incomplete segment and eats all bugs on the segment.
During this stage I also played around with whether the player should draw a single tile at a time or draw three and choose the order, with the latter feeling like a necessary level of control to give to the player.
At this point I felt like I had a good base to move into digital prototyping.
Plant Game Prototypes
Status | Prototype |
Author | Kate Killick |
More posts
- Mechanics iterationsFeb 08, 2022
- Getting to gameplayFeb 03, 2022
- Digital Tiles PrototypeJan 30, 2022
- Plant SimulatorJan 30, 2022
- Sim/Strategy Game AnalysisJan 23, 2022
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