J▲MO GAMES DEV BLOG

Botanist Dev log - Computers and Clients

The Botanist is still coming along well, and feels like I have more or less everything in there that I want. The game has been through quite a few playtests now, and the results have been promising. There is still a lot to go on the user experience and polish side, but the game loop seems to be solid, and more importantly, fun!

Over the weekend I have been polishing up the computer UI, making it feel a bit more like a ‘proper’ computer. You have a desktop with icons for different sites, such as your mail or the seed shop, and little popups for things like opening up requests.

Requests are something I haven’t talked about too much, but they play a big part in becoming a Botanist. Potential clients can post requests online that you can try to complete, by sending a  photograph of a plant that you have grown. They will all have specific needs. Maybe one wants a flower for a friend, a blue tree for their house, or a red grass sample for their garden.

If you can complete the request, you will get a boost to your reputation, moving you on in your journey to becoming a professional Botanist, and unlocking perks like new pots to grow in.

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. You will need to discover, record, and grow your seed collection in order to be able to fulfil these requests, especially as they get more complex as your reputation increases.

The Botanist - Plants!

Alright, so it’s been a long time since my last post. What happened?

Well to be honest, life happened! I got offered a great position as lead designer for a new games company, and I chose to take it. It was a great decision, but meant that Inner City Kids is just too big for me to handle right now.

I have also done a ton of client work and pixel art projects, but that lives in a different place to keep my own development work separate from my client work. That lives here - http://pixelartcommissions.com/

Speaking of development work, I am a long way through the development of a new game called The Botanist. It’s a game about growing plants, and discovering and building your own collection from an almost limitless vault of different seeds, where every word is a plant waiting to be grown.

I have been working on the game for quite a while, and it is almost complete. However I have been neglecting this blog in favour of Twitter, as I really just don’t have too much time, and didn’t feel like I had enough of a following here to justify the maintenance and longer form posts.

With that said, I realised that as much as anything else I need a place to better record my development, and I shouldn’t push this off to one side, especially when people here supported me earlier.

So! I’ll be posting about The Botanist quite a lot as development goes on, catching you up on what the game is all about, what I’ve done so far, and anything else that might be interesting.

If you read this far, thanks! I really appreciate it.

Tons of progress has been made over the past few months, but it has all been on the AI, level editor, boring stuff that I need to make a better game. I’ve also been super busy with other stuff, so posts have slowed down a lot. Going to try my best to get on top of that again though now!

Progress Report

I have a bunch of levels playable now, and it is much faster to work through adding more.

Speech system is functionally complete (it still looks pretty rough), so now the kids can chat with each other.

I added a cool summoner guy and his ghost unit minions. He can summon the ghosts, who can’t be hurt by regular weapons. They charge at you and slash with their swords, dealing a whole lot of damage. If you are unlucky, the summoner might attack too!

Happy 2015! The last two years have been amazing so far, I have had the pleasure of working with a bunch of you on your games and projects, and I am truly excited to see where 2015 will take us together.

I have a few projects lined up and in the works, not forgetting that I am a Playstation developer now too, so expect to hear a lot more about that over the year.

I hope you have a great year, and achieve all that you set out to.

The game has been moving pretty quickly this past week. Random level generation is now in place and working (the screen above is made using it), and side missions can be randomly generated with varying difficulty and map size.