Floravna Trailer
The first semester of our game we had very much over-scoped it. The scope ended up being very large as we had many people and overestimated what we were able to realistically do.
We planned a multiroom farm, the main hub area holding upgrades for the plots, and potentially a genetic research area to make new planimals. With an idea to expand into more areas.
We had planned for a cyberpunk post-apocalyptic theme so we were thinking of a holographic type user interface with the main character being a little robot. 3rd person to allow more characters for the player to create an emotional bond with.
We planned for multiple plant pods for the player to have their planting, and to create more face-to-face time with the planimals we made interacting with the plots a close-up shot. One of our pillars was to have an emotional attachment with the planimals.
Later on, we decided that the planimals would get out of the ground when they were full-grown and move to the Den. The Den was a room where the player could visit their planimals and where they would bring back resources like Neko Atsume.
Early Game Design
Near the end of the semester, the team faced further challenges, and a department announced they were leaving. Our prioritization was not as efficient as it could have been.
We as a design department took our prototype and stripped it down to just taking care of the planimal since it hadn't been the priority and showed it to the team explaining we needed to get the core loop done.
We were able to ship after cutting a significant portion of the game and were able to get the growing readable to players. Once we got the core growing into the engine we started to talk about how we could continue the next semester based on playtests results.
I made and administered a usability playtest that showed in the next semester we should focus on click and drag more than button clicks. Along with testing the feel of the game we wanted (aiming for cute).
End of Semester 1
The second semester we had 6 members 3 from the previous team and 3 new members. I was able to give documentation to catch people up to where we were and the feel of the game and continued to revamp the game goal.
We cut everything down to 2 rooms and made it so that upgrades were in a consolidated area. We decided to try and give the player more interaction with the planimals. Our idea was to make the planimals different colors, stats, and send them to do jobs. The planimals once jobs were complete would come back to give the resources for upgrades. They would also only be able to do a certain amount of jobs before turning into a tree.
This was our way of making a more interesting tension system-wise vs the over-scoped game it was previously. The grown planimals would have roamed the den, waiting to be chosen for specific jobs that matched their required color and age.
Though due to Covid we had to downsize the scope even further to ship on time. We had to make the game not include any systems other than growing. We wanted to passively have particles for seasons which though not implemented properly are still accessible.
We had to do quite a bit since we were 2 designers and 4 programmers, but we were able to pull it through even with the hurdles we faced.
Semester 2 progress
Brianna Cherise
UI & UX Designer
