Thanks so much, I’m glad to hear you enjoyed it! There are heaps of changes I’d like to make, since I was really just winging a lot of it for this build.
- More interesting shapes/angles for trunks and branches is a big one, and potentially some height variation on the ground too.
- An art overhaul if I can find someone more competent to help, because I acknowledge the assets are a mish-mash of pretty disparate styles at the moment.
- Adding things like different kinds of mosses, lichens and fungi on the bark, as well as insect, bird and animal habitats - again, this is something that would definitely work better with an artist’s help.
- The soundtrack needs a lot of expansion. As it is, roughly 10% of trees add to the playlist a random track that’s a blend of music & wildlife sounds, but I only got 1.5 of them done in time for the end of the jam, heh.
- The ability to eat fruit, conferring different temporary abilities and cosmetic effects. The game was obliquely inspired by Tale of Tales’ The Endless Forest, and I always really liked that feature.
- A bunch of little tweaks to the procedural stuff to make sure the algorithms are set up to give the right balance between the most variation possible and generating consistently interesting results.
- Flesh out the save/load system to support multiple files and allow for easy, flexible conversion of external text files into a working game world.
- I also wanted to create an entirely new game mode, where the world is generated from a seed (with some variation in background etc.), and then that’s used to automatically generate the trees, and the goal is to travel as far to the right as you can in a single day before nightfall, without touching the ground. It was better suited for my original physics settings where climbing trees was a lot harder, but I still like the idea, so I might end up developing it as a separate game.
I’ve been working on other projects since the jam, but I’ve come back and done some updating now, just little tweaks mostly - I’ll upload a proper dev log shortly. Fancy tree/branch shapes are next on my list and I hope to get to those soon.