#zen forest

Zen Forest photo by Lily Seidel.

I'm adding curves to the tree branch math, and started pushing things in weird directions. Definitely going to need to figure out some rules for this. I think this stuff goes overboard even though it looks nice.  It seems that I'm going to soon be meeting regularly in the mornings with a few friends from other local game companies to work on our projects together. It'll be nice to have the responsibility to show progress regularly. I can lose focus while alone.

I vined some progress this morning in a coffee shop. Here I introduced some variation on branch angles. I think it looks nice, but I have several plans on where to go from here. I already tested one out and it was awful, so we'll see how the rest go. I try to get a little done before work as often as possible, and often do so in a nearby coffee shop. After work, my brain slows to a near-halt, and it's hard to work through creative problems. I read a study about how you have a limited amount of decision-making energy in a day. After considering where my time goes in my limited life-span, I decided to invest in myself first, then the company. I pay into my own skills and future off the top, and my company gets the rest, instead of giving it all to the company up front, leaving me with little to nothing. Not sure if that's a crappy thing to do, but it's had a pretty positive impact on my life skill-wise (which my company benefits from) and artistically. I only work for a short while in the mornings, but it's amazing how far you can get working consistently, as small as each work session may be. Certainly it's better than just waiting for a better time, because it seems that doesn't really come along.

The earliest prototype footage of this "game" was shared in an earlier post. I wanted to get some proper branches in, so I got in my rough draft of the branch logic, and here's the result. I put together a plan to layer different sets of algorithms so you can get different tree species. I even had an idea for how people could share species by giving each one a name that people can just tell someone else, and when that name is typed in, bam, you get that tree's visual/mathematical setup. After having some people playtest it, I think I've found a more interesting path to follow. We'll see how that works out. The trunk can still grow all weird, but I decided to keep this simple. I'd share a web build, but growing too many branches can just make everything chug, so we'll just keep it as a video for now.

I got my most recently released project post out of the way, so now I'll start giving you a peek into what I'm currently doing. I had this vision of a game where you grow a tree. I was originally playing with more "gamey" ideas, even making a competitive tree growing game where you fight over sunlight. The problem was that when I started prototyping, I got this really relaxed feeling that I needed at the time. It felt like self-medication in a way. Since then, I've dropped designs that work against this feeling, and have embraced designs that work toward it. You can maybe get a feel for it in this, the first video I captured. There's nothing to do at this point. You just grow and expand. I'll get into more detail on the direction I'm taking now in later posts.