A game about growing plants (beta 6 released!)

[Taehl]

Important news!



Plant crossbreeding is complete.

[Robin]

Ah, great progress!

What, exactly, do you like about it? (I mean that literally: Is it better because it's green, or because it has larger leaves, or something about its shape...?)

It's mostly the distribution of leaves and branches. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think I see a lot of plants with at the end of each branch one or two leaves and that's it, or a single main branch that stretches completely upright.

Things I've seen in other plants that looked good: leaves directly attached to the main branch, with no branch splitting. Leaves attached to a single length branch, attached to the main branch.

[Taehl]

I've been playing around with it, and since I'm under-budget at pieces being rendered, I added twigs (and leaves) which greatly help "fill in" the plants. Hopefully that gives them a better feel.

Here's my attempt to breed a purple plant (from left to right):


What I did was breed the somewhat purple ones at the left together to make a new plant just to the right of them. If it was less purple, I removed it, but I kept those that were more. When parent plants are really close in a certain trait, the small factor of random mutation becomes the leading source of variation. Keep the plants that change in your favor, and with some patience, you can get any trait wherever you want it.

[Lap]

On seeing the title I thought this was going to be some Dopefarmer clone. I am pleasantly surprised.

[kikito]

This looks increasingly interesting.

Oh, also, I have a name suggestion for this game - Squirt the daysies!

[Taehl]

Wind is in. I'll be tweaking it as I go on, but the base technology is all there. Note how the leaves all end up pointing in approximately the same direction when the wind is strong enough, and how leaves bend more than branches, and little branches bend more than big branches. The math for it ended up being surprisingly elegant, thanks to sine waves.



I'm planning on having half of the wind set based on the cursor's x-coordinate, so the trees will react to the cursor a bit. The other half will be made by... Something which somehow affects trees based on their position, so the wind will blow from one side to the other (the trees won't all bend at the same time).

[icesoldier]

This is looking very cool. I like watching this develop, and I want to see your wind tweaks.

[Taehl]

Ensayia should be posting some pictures of his new game graphics any time now. We'd love to hear what you think of them.

[Ryne]

Out of curiosity, what are you using to create those gifs?

[Taehl]

I use Fraps to record the game, then open the resulting video and export it as a multiple .gif with VirtualDub (along with adjusting size and other tweaks). Finally, I use Dropbox to host it online. You can get them all for free, so you should have no trouble making your own.