[SA Game Jam 2016] Plantanica

Nadz37

- Jam name (SA Game Jam 2016)
- Game Name: Botanica
- Level of experience: Hobbyist
- 72hr entry

Team-Members:
-Rudi Lotter(Wrote the story)
-Daniel Bowden(script)
-Nadia De Klerk(Plant illustration)
-Muhammad Seedat(script)
-Kishen Patel(script)
-Kenny Webb(UI & CI)
-Robert Marufu(Character Illustration)

Gameplay:
Mix and match ingredients to come up with the ultimate survivor plant ready to heal your new planet. Unfortunately, not all the ingredients contains a healing property as Dr Stebbins becomes increasingly deranged in his pursuit for perfect science.

Game Synopsis:

As usual the Earth is in distress! its all gone to pot, the time
is almost up. Human life will soon cease to exist! But there
is hope yet. HD131399Ab!! (which is a planet)
HD131399Ab or BOB for short. The Planet is perfect!
Perfect in every way ... every way ... besides breathable air
... small thing really.

Thus you Master Botanist Dr Stebbins and Gene-
sequencing genius Dr Beatrix have be sent to BOB with the
goal or creating rapid growing, air producing flora. The
Plant however is gonna need to be bad­ass, bad­ass
enough to survive all the other plants, the grand Poobar of
the greenhouse, the Norris of nature, the perfect plant. So
there you are, sent ahead of the rest, to setup shop, and
well you know, solve the problem and save mankind!

Art preview of one of the creation combos :)


Concept Art of Dr Stebbins

Nadz37

Synopsis added.

Nadz37

Bump: Gameplay added and a small preview of the art produced thus far.

BenJets

Sounds rad guys! First bit of art looks great!

As a heads up, there's already a game called Botanica. Maybe worth considering a different name if you'd like to maybe take the game further later!

RokoBasilisk

Cool artwork. Look forward to playing the game.

Nadz37

Yikes! Thanks BenJets! Speaking with the team now about it :) We'll prolyl change ot XD
Glad you like the artwork so far Roko, hopefully we can start uploading some other previews as well ^^

Nadz37

Concept Art for Stebbins added.
Game Name changed :)

Nadz37

Behind the scenes of our team!
XD
https://youtu.be/lE25yh4F5gs

Nadz37

We're ran a bit out of time. Hitting off the building now, so hopefully we can submit in an hour?
We were a big team, but only three of us worked on it full-time, whilst some could only make it a few hours or day.

Warning though, not sure if the build will work, struggling getting a script working that adds the ingredients. But we did agree as a team that the experience of the game jam was epic and worth it. We're all freshly hatched in our experience, so every jam we learn something new, which makes this worth it XD

Check out some of artwork while the guys compile the last few pixels.

Nadz37

Hi there
Please see our link for our submission.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6yOHRoQVLw8YlJzSC1ZNXJYbEE

The following details are written by Mo who is one of our scriptors detailing the issues with the build:
"We had a few compilation issues, but we managed to get a basic prototype working. We unfortunately ran out of time in compiling a tutorial to guide the player through the game, so please refer to the "ReadMe" document contained in the submission folder."

We can't wait for the next jam ;)

Elyaradine

I like the theme of being able to grow your own alien monster-plants, especially if they have differences that aren't purely aesthetic. I enjoyed the intro, though I felt that that would usually be the kind of thing I'd only work on right at the end, when there's a functioning core game loop.

I think making the game Android-only is quite a barrier to getting people to play-test, and being able to provide keyboard+mouse alternatives to mobile input may help.

I feel like there wasn't quite enough in there to show quite where you're going with this practically, so it's difficult to give feedback otherwise. (e.g. "Plants can battle each other" is something that's very difficult to visualise game-play for. Or, rather, the number of ways to implement something like that is so vast that the description isn't very useful without accompanying gameplay.)

I don't think it's useful to work in as large a team as you've got. From what I've seen, teams of 1-3 seem to be the most effective. With a larger team, communication becomes more and more difficult, and organising the team becomes a bigger problem to tackle. This generally forces a lot of planning at the start and makes it difficult to pivot if you discover new/better ideas, or find that your existing idea isn't very strong. It makes it difficult to scope, because you start having to make estimates based on several other (generally unknown) peoples' ability, rather than only your own. It makes it easier for people not to pull their weight, because there are so many other people to pick up the slack, and because there's less opportunity for people to feel like they made a meaningful contribution (and also less opportunity to learn cool stuff). It can also make the message of the game noisier, with too many voices trying to vie for dominance. Doubling your number of team-mates doesn't mean that you double how much work you can get done!

If growing alien fighter monster-plants is something that interests you (because, again, I think it's a cool theme!), it could be useful to make a few other prototypes of this to explore a bit more around what you've got. It's okay to have a bunch of different mini-games tied together thematically, but your overall product's going to be held back by the weakest one. The maze mini-game is currently very generic, and I think it would be nice to see it both aesthetically and mechanically more tied into your game's theme.

I enjoyed the plant designs. Some of them had some nice personality, especially in their faces, and I'd like to see the same sort of personalities/differentiation come through in the rest of the plants. I can imagine them dancing a little, like Groot or the plants in Plants vs Zombies, reacting to your touches and swipes. (I feel like that sort of interaction could be more useful to tackle in a jam game than an opening cutscene is, though it does depend on the game.)

I'd like to see your game designers work a bit independently with the same theme, and see what sorts of interactions you come up with (and also discover what each designer's strengths/preferences are, and how these change what kind of game it becomes)!