Link to the game page

 

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The brief

• Built in WebGL

  • To be embedded in the information websites of the Game development courses offered by GCU to make them more interactive and as a showcase of what can be created by students in the course itself.

• The game should be visually stunning and gorgeous to draw players in, while also running on low-end computers.

• The age rating of the game should be approximately PEGI-3, being suitable for all audiences, but targeted specifically towards prospective students.

• The controls should be simple enough to pick up within minutes of starting. 

• Singleplayer

• The player should have a good idea of what the game is and how it plays within 5 minutes of starting.

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Pitch

Behind the clouds, up in the sky, there is a beautiful island with glowing flowers… make it your own garden and enjoy the peaceful environment, exploring all the beautiful corners and discovering your own flower species!

Visit a charming garden on a beautiful floating island, discover all the new plant species to decorate your perfect garden and watch it take on a new life when night falls and the flowers reveal themselves in a new light

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The Game

The game is a zen game with a basic lore that allows to explore this low poly sky island that presents different flower species, gather them and mix them to create unique flowers. During the night, flowers behaviour change and they start glowing in the dark, while some animals and benches are placed around the world to add a little bit of life and interactivity!

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Design - Ideation Phase

During this phase, we discussed over the brief and brainstormed as a team to come up with an idea that could solve the problem, look good on our portfolio and also engage the entire team as they would have to work on it for quite a long time.

Those are the ideas that we proposed to our client:

- Garden Game: The first concept we had was for a low-poly first person 3d zen game where the player is a gardener that grows flowers in a relaxed environment with beautiful scenery.

- Firefly Puzzle Game: The Firefly puzzle game is a 2.5d metroidvania-like puzzle platformer where the player has to explore a dark cave system inhabited by a mysterious population of strange creatures that use captured fireflies as light and power.

Twinstick Shooters
The Twin-stick shooter concept was created to target the “Fun” aspect of the game, with flashy combat and interesting battle mechanics. In it, the player takes control over one of three playable characters, explores a procedurally generated dungeon fighting off hordes of enemies, and gathers loot.

 

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In the end, we chose to go with the garden game due to its uniqueness, and because it would allow for more innovation and experimentation

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Design: the flower system

The main part of the game were the flower combination, an idea taken from orchids hybrids, and I've imediately started to look into possible solutions. It would have to be procedurally generated, as we had a space limit on the total build and we wanted to save space on the models, so imediately I looked into L systems. Unfortunately, we had to discard it for a simpler version because of the timespan and complexity that it could have brought over the project. This simpler version works in a way that split each flower in three (leaves, flowers and stem) and utilizes data from the stem rig to populate the flower. Apply mix and match to this process, and you obtain unique combinations of flowers that grow exponentially with any base flower added.

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Design: the island

To enhance the first minutes we redesigned the initial island so that the initial 5 minutes would have been more spectacular, with a path of cutscenes that the player would have gone through to get to the mixing machine.

Then, we decided that it was too much for one island, and decided to introduce a second waterfall island visible from the first one and  accessible throug an airship after completing a small quest.

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Coding: flower generator and spawner

At the beginning, to understand how to simplify the L system, I created a tool in unity that placed flowers based on the stem informations and allowed us to assemble the flowers runtime on unity.

The system requires to have an initial stem setup, but make the new model so that the animations of the flower growing are translated to all the hybrids.

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Link to the game page

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