Design Post

Oh boy where to start with this one. But the basic idea wasn’t too complicated. The theme was Growth. I wanted to make something with trees! They were really on my mind after the video edit, since I drew a lot of inspiration from Fantasia 2000’s Firebird sequence.

My thinking for the system went like this: a single tree is a system of growth. You feed it water, air, and sunlight, and it will grow upward and outward (one system). And as it grows outward, and loses branches, it gorws new trees! The forest acts as a surrounding system, with a stock of trees. The number of trees grow from a stable ecosystem of light and water, flowing inward to the forest’s size. And then another system, that of animals, exists within the forest. Their own growth relies on a steady flow of fruit from the trees (the red apples in the scene), and I wanted to show that too! So many systems within one context, and it was hard for me to choose just one to represent.

I think that difficulty led to my problems in creating this scene. I was left without a lot of focus on which part I would work on. And I let myself focus too hard on the apple tree. I modeled it with particle assistance from Blender. I probably spent more time on that tree than any other part of this little sketched game.

To show the growth of the tree itself, I used a line renderer. The systematic idea was this:

• Have the tree grow upward when there was sunlight
• Show the growth by adding points to the line renderer
• have the growth speed controlled by how much water was in the tree
• control the rain on the plant as a player.

The prototype here has a couple of those elements represented. It has a sunlight sequence that changes the color of the scene, it has the growing tree essential bits. But those two is about it. The tree isn’t controllable how I wanted it to be, nor is it a full ecosystem.

That said, it was a fun little project to do, and I think the result is fine. I have some stuff to work on next time if I come back to this idea!