Coming out of the Godot Wild Jam #79 we knew we had more of a toy than a game. You could place plants, and click on seeds to make more plants, but really your only meaningful choice was where to place it. After collecting all the feedback we got from the Jam, we felt the game concept  still had potential, and we wanted to continue development on it. 

But where to start?

We collected the notes, and lumped them into different categories. The thing that came up again and again was there just wasn’t enough to do. Also one of the goals we had was for it to feel like you could make simple music with the plants, and that missed the mark.

Laying everything out we settled on three Pillars for the game: Music, Gnomes, and Plants. We wanted the music portion to feel front and center, we wanted to lean into more gnome interactions and we wanted the plants to feel more meaningful. 

Through that process we realized we were actually giving choices away so the first thing we removed was auto generating seeds. Those need to be earned, so we needed to create a resource. Then we needed some way to spend the resource, so we created a shop system. Now already you had more choices, and more to do, but it didn’t satisfy all the pillars. 

Next was the music. We tried a few iterations, but eventually landed on a clock hand spinning around allowing for looping the music. This was inspired from a youtube video on visualizing music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UphAzryVpY and thought it fit perfectly with a round stump. To tie the music into the other pillars we added a reward (resource) whenever you complete a specific combination of plants. i.e. a song. Because placement was very important for this, we added the ability to re-plant/move plants and harvest them for resources if you ended up placing one where you didn’t want to.

The gnome update was to get them to generate the resource for you overtime, but slowly. This put the game more into the idle category, which we think fit with the overall goals. Long term we see this more of a feature you can unlock, not something you get right from the beginning, but it is helpful for testing now. We also decided to give another choice to the player, so for each stage of the tree, you can choose between two gnome color options, and which 3 new seeds you want. 

We still have a lot more we want to do, but instead of developing in a vacuum we thought it would be fun to post throughout the development and see what you all think. Till next time