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.