Plant Game
Exploration of open world puzzle design, and pushing the limits of player freedom.
Controls
Mouse to look around
WASD to move
Space to jump
E to interact with objects
M to open the map
Right click to place plants
1, 2, 3 … to select inventory slots
F1 to enable the commentary nodes
Development
I’d made a system a while ago for doing 3d tile-based games in unreal but never ended up using it for anything, since the brief was so open forcing it to be something tile based helped to restrict the prototyping phase. I started with some early experimentation with moving around very large tiles, but this was too similar to another game I’d made. Eventually the prototypes developed into more of a Spelunky type thing, where there’s a bunch of objects with unique properties and you use items on the objects in different ways to get coins and complete the level. I tried a bunch of different stuff here but was struggling to make the interactions interesting without very specific setups. I think it’s just because I wasn’t particularly used to this type of design, randomizing the levels earlier on might have helped to have interesting combinations arising naturally rather than hand placing everything. I would still like to try a game like this at some point, but it was already halfway through the time alloted for the game, so I decided to switch to something I was more familiar with.
One of the item types I developed for the Spelunky prototype was a fungus that would slowly grow to fill the space, I then made more versions of the same object that grew in lines, or a flat plane and I was finding it fun to just move around on these dynamic structures that you could place anywhere. So, I took the plants into a new project and got rid of everything else except the inventory system and started trying to make interesting obstacle courses to navigate around This soon turned into more puzzly kinds of levels where you must combine 2 or 3 plants in a more specific configuration to get across a gap. A lot of the first ones I found were quite complicated but eventually I had a set of 15ish pretty fun levels with a nice range of difficulties. I then started to combine them into a shared open environment which introduced a bunch of challenges, primarily ensuring that the player couldn’t easily cheat their way out of the level by stacking plants on top of other plants. At first, I tried a decay system where plants would eventually disappear after a few seconds, but it added unnecessary timing to the challenges and the seeds had to be on a timer as well. It also required things to be spread out more so that you couldn’t grab plants from one section and use them in other while the placed plants were still decaying. After several other ideas, I decided on the inventory approach. I’m still not entirely happy with it but it was the least bad option.
Overall this project taught me a lot about trying to have multiple distinct puzzles in the same game space, and why it's not really worth it if that's not going to be the focus of the game. If I were to expand this game or doing something similar one of the first things I would want to put in, is someway of visualizing what areas are accessible from where the player is standing this would have avoided many of the errors that ended up in the prototype.
Water's Edge
Simple prototype of a game where you can control the height of water with the mouse wheel. The first level introduces the mechanic and how it interacts with buttons and crates, aswell as standing on things to float. The second level expands the mechanic with two different bodies of water that can be controlled independently, the third shows crates stacked on top of each other and the fourth is about more complicated interactions.
The core idea is solid, and expanding to support multiple areas of water was a good way to increase the ceiling for complexity a lot without introducing more arbitrary systems. Just difficult to communicate where buttons are maybe this is something that would work better in 2d.
Fibrous
Made for a 48 hour game jam in 2023, the theme was roots. Probably more happy with it aesthetically, in the way it clearly communicates the rules through simple shapes. But the gameplay was too unfocused to be interesting, the branching thing is just sort of added on to another game about the topology of objects.