A game about growing plants (beta 6 released!)

[Robin]

Make a cannabis plant algorithm and you will get all of my monies.

FIFY.

[MooseHead]

...Hey you're from the Netherlands.

You should want a cannabis plant, too!

[Taehl]

New beta. Contains improvements, fixes, and tweaks, the menu has been unlocked, and the hot new survival gamemode has been added. We /really/ need feedback on this project. Nobody's even said anything about Ensayia's new plant graphics!

[Araqiel]

Survival mode is a cool concept, but gameplay is a little bland. It's too fast to really put any thought into it, so it becomes click as fast as possible.

I got to 628.94 years, is that good?

[Robin]

...Hey you're from the Netherlands.

You should want a cannabis plant, too!

Why? I already live in the Netherlands.

Nobody's even said anything about Ensayia's new plant graphics!

They look fine. I haven't said anything about it because I am terrible with graphics, but there you go.

Survival mode is a cool concept, but gameplay is a little bland. It's too fast to really put any thought into it, so it becomes click as fast as possible.

This is very true.

[StoneCrow]

survival mode is fun, was a little bit of a click fest though xD
the new art is great btw, and a significant improvement over the original art

are there any plans for a buisness mode, where certain valuable assets of plants can be harvested, like fruit.
then enabling you to unlock more genes to grow with in that gamemode, or buy additions like fullscreen mode ??

anyway, still looking great

[MooseHead]

Oh, the new release is awesome, as is the graphics.

Only thing I don't like is the font used in the Menu (and the blandness of the menu) but that's alright because it's BETA.

I have a question though.
What kinda music are you gonna use?

[nevon]

The menu looks horrible, but I'm pretty sure it's just a placeholder. I didn't quite get survival mode. How do you make plants survive longer? What's the objective? I just didn't get it.

As for the main gameplay objective (grow a plant like *this*), I think it's a good idea. However, I think you need more ways to affect the genes. Maybe ways to affect the soil, and in turn affect how the plants turn out. If you're supposed to grow a red tree and you start out with 5 green trees, it's pretty boring to wait around for mutations.

[Taehl]

The menu buttons are just placeholders until Ensayia can hand-draw the real ones. They're certainly not staying, don't worry. Personally, I'm hoping he'll draw a new background before he gets to the buttons, but yeah, they need to be done. Thank you for your patience.


The point of survival is to be as diverse as possible with time pressure. Each time the disease hits, it chooses one specific family to kill. If you just crossbreed the same two plants over and over, they're all going to be related, and thus the disease can kill all of them (or at least a lot of them) in one swoop. However, if you try to keep a few different families, the disease won't be able to affect them all at the same time, so you can lose some but not all of your plants. If you're down to one family, you can try to work on getting different families again by crossing certain pairs of plants together repeatedly and hoping mutation makes them more diverse (but not with eachother, or you'll bridge the families and lose the diversity you're working towards!). My current record is 1055 years.

Okay, so, you all feel it's too fast. I certainly won't argue with that. How can we fix it? There are several factors affecting its perceived speed:
- Plant growth rate (since plants must be at least 70% grown to be crossbred)
- Base rate at which the disease attacks (faster attacks = shorter game)
- Rate at which disease attacks get faster (they get faster as the game goes on, so you eventually have to lose. That's the point of a survival game.)
- Randomness of the disease's target (currently, it's completely random, meaning you can have long pauses where nothing is affected as well as moments where you'll lose plant after plant after plant. I could, however, point it at a random existing plant, meaning at least one plant will die every time it hits. Coupled with making the disease go slower, would this be a good change?)
- "Fuzziness" of the disease's target family (higher fuzz increases the chance that an entire family will be hit, but means more plants will be lost in general)
Knowing all this, what would you suggest I do to make survival have a better pace?


Music? Ensayia still needs to listen to the songs I've suggested, but at the moment, I think the main game music may be something like this album, or something else that's very ambient. What do you think?

are there any plans for a buisness mode, where certain valuable assets of plants can be harvested, like fruit.
then enabling you to unlock more genes to grow with in that gamemode, or buy additions like fullscreen mode ??

You don't need to buy fullscreen mode - just hit Alt-Enter (yes, even in the beta). We're going to add an options menu at some point which will also let you do this.

However, I think you need more ways to affect the genes. Maybe ways to affect the soil, and in turn affect how the plants turn out. If you're supposed to grow a red tree and you start out with 5 green trees, it's pretty boring to wait around for mutations.

For starters, each level will have pre-defined plants for you to work with, so you won't get screwed like that.

But I do have a kind of meta-game in mind which should help these concerns: There will be a number of special named plants which will be unlocked whenever the player breeds a plant with similar genes (in any gamemode). Once unlocked, a button will be added to the screen which will allow the player to place a copy of that special plant once per game (that is, for example, it can be used only one time in a round of Survival, but can be used again (once) if they start a new round of it). These special plants will be more than just pointless swag, though - each one would be different, and would have several "perfect" genes (that is, fully maxed or completely gone). That way, if you want a certain gene (say, big leaves), you could place one of these special plants (the one with the largest leaves that's possible in the game) and crossbreed with it to instantly get a major boost towards your goal. How does that sound?


Thank you very much for the comments! They're very useful, and much-needed.

[Robin]

I'd say the major problem with survival mode is that, in the beginning, the disease strikes too soon. This way you don't even stand a chance to breed diverse plants.