Posted January 30, 2022 by Kate Killick
At the start of this week I wanted to come back to the plant theme from a different angle. From research and speaking to people I concluded that a tile placement game would be a simpler place for me to start in learning about designing strategy games.
I made another paper proto, quickly moving into Illustrator and Google Sheets, focused on the simple mechanic of creating and completing segments of a vine, then scoring based on the objects attached to the vine. This is based on ideas from a few different sources:
The first objects for the plant game score as follows:
This felt easy to expand on with more conflicting items, and I also mixed missions into later iterations, such as complete a segment with one of each object, or with x leaves, or bloom 3 more flowers, etc. The reward for this would be a tile with a special power-up, such as a bird that can be placed on an incomplete segment and eats all bugs on the segment.
During this stage I also played around with whether the player should draw a single tile at a time or draw three and choose the order, with the latter feeling like a necessary level of control to give to the player.
At this point I felt like I had a good base to move into digital prototyping.