Here's my incoherent post-mortem of sorts.
CW: Enthusiastic rambling about my decorative plants and how they influenced my dev-process
Fun fact: I actually got the inspiration for my COMPO-entry from these lovely lifeforms I've been maintaining.
It has been rather recently that I found the joys of keeping houseplants. A few years ago someone left cuttings of coleus scutellaroides in my apartment complex's shared space and I took them home.
Turns out it's a very popular decorative plant and easy to take care of. Not much sunlight available during winter where I live, but they're enduring quite well!
The big one in the middle started flowering in late summer/fall.
When the flower had pretty much dropped its petals and shriveled in november, I jokingly thought I should "harvest" the seeds.
I was surprised that one flower can produce hundreds of seeds, and you can barely see them with your naked eye.
Now, ain't they cute?
I thought it would be fun to store them in this quaint glass bottle.
I was actually one of the people who down voted the theme, but luckily I had my own playful harvest-experience to draw inspiration from.
That would provide the basis for my game.
So basically it's a plant growing-sim.
With a creepy head.
I decided to restrict the resolution to 640x360, which (I think?) is a standard for mobile devices.
I've always had a certain disdain towards mobile-games, so I thought it would be a personal challenge to make something playable on a phone, let alone in the portrait-mode.
Didn't really think about the UI much beyond the first mock-up, so I wouldn't say it's very intuitive, even though totally playable both on desktop and mobile. The final layout closely resembles the original plan, but I added indicators for moisture, soil and growth. Also scrapped the planned Sound-button to make room for the dialogue box.
At some point during the jam I decided to set the game in a "botanical space-station". One reason was probably the "spacey" synth-sound in the BGM I composed very early on, so it seemed appropriate.
I had situated the spawn-point of the materials on top of the plant, so it felt natural to present it as an actual dispenser. That way I wouldn't need to draw complex animations either.
Would have liked to "dock" all the tools and buttons to the environment in an effort to make everything seem like one unified structure, but didn't have the time to implement this idea to full extent.
I also imagined the floating "Station Head" as a central AI of sorts. I thought it could perhaps be a hologram projected from the surrounding structures. Someone pointed out that currently it looks like a soccer-stadium!
The character outputs a different response depending on the item you're holding. They vary from explanation of the mechanics to some background lore and a few humorous remarks.
I think this is a fun element as is, but venturing back to reach the head multiple times feels like a chore, so it's something that some players might overlook.
At first I wasn't even entirely sure what the purpose of this character was going to be. One idea was that you could actually use all the different tools either on the plant or the head (with disastrous results!)
BTW My previous game for LD51 also had a similar "infernal machine"-thing going on.
It too had a series of pipe-systems you used for (what do you know!) harvesting spider eggs! I guess you could consider that a thematic throwback of sorts.
And speaking of the game, it was recently included in this Surreal Games Iceberg. Now that's what I consider a major merit. My creative work is now canonized as officially obscure!
Another throwback to past jams would be one of the mini-games in our LD46 JAM-entry.
In that one you could either pluck the petals of the flower or give it some water.
At first I was a bit hesitant to repeat myself, but decided to go with the initial idea since the focus was going to be quite different this time.
But I digress.
Overall I'm pretty happy how it turned out.
I think there's plenty of good ideas there, but some of the things could use rework. The biggest problem was that I left no time to adjust the scrolling-mechanic and some of the tools, so the overall experience feels a bit sluggish and janky. The ending-event is also quite abrupt.
Continuing for the extra 24h and submitting to JAM would've left me the time to fix all the issues and make it prettier, but I insisted on COMPO!
It remains to be seen whether I'll update the game or use some of the best elements in some other project in the future.
Thanks to everyone who came and tried it!
Good luck with the results, and keep on the jam!
