Thanks for the great questions and I'm glad you like the premise so far.
Working on cohesive goals outside of merely watching grass grow, so to speak, has been one of our main concerns. On the one hand, it's already challenging and interesting to try to make your own garden, as the competition of plants behaves unpredictably. One plant will shadow another, and suddenly half of your garden's trees have died. On the other hand, it's also important to motivate you to actually create that garden and work with the plants, besides a vague prospect of a dream garden.
So here's a difficult exercise: how do you rely on plants to progress in the game in terms of new technology or resources, without relying on cultivation? Something we wanted to definitely avoid was industrialization or cultivation of plants merely for resources. We wanted to lean into the wild growth. Plants can be pruned or cut, they blossom and grow fruit. However, you can't make topiaries, as the plants will always grow wild and calculate what's best for them in terms of sun exposure, obstacle avoidance, etc. There's no way to bend the plants to your will completely -- working with and around them is the main goal.
Putting the "plant mechanics" to use in as many different interconnected ways as possible is something we're currently working towards.
Now, there are two ways to interact with the world in Idu: magic spells and crafting. Magic spells are used instead of tools, for picking up items by compressing them, or breaking down items such as concrete into sand. Crafting is used for making pumps, pipes, storage, and other similar things. Anything new we'd introduce would have to fit into this system.
Hence we introduced Converters -- file cabinets with antennas on top -- that have to be placed near flowers to work. At the moment, those antennas pick up "flower power" signals and convert things in their file cabinets into another resource. It's still experimental, but it already forces you to pay attention to the plants and tend to them differently. Because it's difficult to predict where the next flowers or shoots will be, you have to constantly prune the plants until there's enough "coverage" for the antennas to work.
There's lots of potential with similar ideas we'll be constantly experimenting with. We're thinking of tying the tech tree to Converters in some way, and introduce more ways to experiment with plants to enable progression in the game, without relying on farming mechanics.
Indeed, terraforming in terms of rebuilding everything and let the plants take over is a big part of the game. But letting the plants over is just really difficult without lots of strategical planning, construction of irrigation systems, and experimentation of how different plants behave with one another, especially as all of their needs are different.
Creator of
Recent community posts
Hi all! We're a team of two developers making a plant simulation game where every single leaf matters, turning each plant into a giant brain that calculates their next decision every step of the way. Every leaf decides how and where the whole plant will continue growing, as photosynthesis, simulated roots with water uptake and more dictate the twists and turns of every shoot, twig, and resulting branches, leaves and flowers. Watch unique plants sprout from seed to sapling, one bud at a time. 
You're also a silly wizard who builds complex irrigation systems, casts spells to break down concrete into sand, and builds antennas.
Anyway, this is a lot. And this post doesn't have a tag because we don't know how much we've yet to go, although we have a plan. We're rewriting a lot of things all the time because we're also making our own engine for the game, and optimizing it so the game will hopefully run on potato laptops, too. So the final version of the game will take some time.
I'm starting this thread to keep you posted on what we've changed in each demo, and why. We started out with just watching plants grow many years ago, and now we've graduated to meaningful interactions with the plants and their environment, without making a gardening game with identical plants. Instead, it's all about unruly growth, sharing a world with wild vegetation, and boundless exploration.
Project page
https://epcc.itch.io/idu
Hi all! I'm one of the two developers of Idu, a strategic sandbox game about growing plants that wish to reclaim nature. Every plant has a mind of its own and decides whether to grow a new shoot, twig, or leaf and in which direction, or whether to grow at all, depending on environmental factors and your actions -- every step of the way. The plants also compete with each other for sunlight and resources. So we're aiming to be a bit like the Dwarf Fortress of plant simulators, eventually.
However, you can just kick back and watch enormous trees sprout from seed to sapling, one leaf bud and twig at a time. Or build various structures and gardens on the barren island and observe how the plants react. You can also prune the branches and see how it affects their growth.
And don't forget to play around with interactive, flowing water that passes through porous materials, build irrigation systems from pumps and pipes, and just have fun as an explorer!
Idu is still in the very early stages, but this is the first time when our procedurally generated islands are fun to explore and various plants are interesting to grow. We're going to add way more features along the way.
We're also developing the game engine powering the game to support the complex simulation so it's a serious passion project.
As a bonus, the game can currently run on most laptops with a dedicated GPU, and we're planning to make it way better.
Read more about the game on our itch.io page and download the demo for Linux and Windows
