Let’s GROOOW!

Let’s Grooow!

This is a game I designed for a class along with two classmates, Mikulas Stastny (Programming) and Akemi Hashimura (Art).

The goal of the game from a gameplay standpoint is to grow organic food to supply a nearby restaurant with local produce. Each day you cut grass to create mulch, place the mulch and sow seeds, and harvest the previous day’s plantings in order to supply the ingredients for recipes requested by the restaurant. After providing a certain amount of meals, the restaurant begins to request more dishes ever day. Some plants benefit others, so wise plantings can lead to bountiful harvests, but make sure that you’ve left enough plots fallow so you have mulch and arable land for the next day’s plantings.

From an educational perspective, the goal of the game is to allow players to discover beneficial crop pairs based on real gardening techniques. Our hope was that players would leave the game with an increased understanding of permaculture techniques and a greater appreciation for synergistic plantings that are far underutilized in monoculture agriculture.

As this project was limited to a single semester, there are a lot of things I would love to go back and change from a design perspective. These changes include, but are not limited to:

• A proper tutorial

  • A walkthrough for first-time players showing the basics of playing (how to move, how to select and use tools, etc.)

  • This tutorial would not show all beneficial pairings, but would indicate that players should pay close attention to how much they harvest from each planting.

• Mouse hover for more information about planted crops

• More detailed soil quality

  • Soil degrading over time, which could then be repaired through planting legumes to nitrogenate the soil

• More options how to grow

  • With or without mulch, but planting without requires an extra step of watering

  • This would also require a rework of growing times, something we considered early in development but nixed due to time constraints

• More plants and recipes

  • More interesting gameplay comes from more interesting choices

• More areas (new fields)

  • Once players master the starter field, it would be nice to introduce larger fields with more obstacles such as stones

• Increase in difficulty

  • In line with more fields and obstacles, I would also like to add in increased requirements (more recipes per turn, more ingredients per recipe, etc.)

• Rebalancing

  • More balance in the late game so that players don’t end up with massive stockpiles of unused crops

• Reintroduce the store

  • Early in development, we dropped the store in order to simplify development, but adding it back in would increase difficulty in a desirable manner