Would You Like a Pot of Electric Spider Plants? （Procedural Art)
Aims and Objectives
My various experiences on failing growing plants made me feel like there could be random results for non-professional people on plants issue, while for procedural art “random” is also an important feature. This game aims to let the players gain random electric spider plants with no pain, as no real plant will die for these.
Playtest and feedback
In the first version, there could be a huge difference in the length of the leaves in the same pot. For example, one was extremely long, and the rest was almost absent, which didn’t look very harmonious. For improving this, the random ranges were adjusted to make all the producing more average. In addition, sprites are divided into different groups with different scripts to make the leaves face different directions for a more natural-looking.
By the end of this project, I realized maybe a common random value can be applied for all the seeds, and each group of the seeds share another common random value beyond that, to make the whole plant looks more reasonable and at the same time achieve the target of “dramatically random”.
(One player without English as mother language reported that the font of the words was not that easy to be recognised. More reports may need before deciding whether it needs to be adjusted.)
Reflection
The current way to realise is to add Trail Renderers with a long destruction time to several unseeable sprites as the seeds and ask the sprites to move by parabola function with a random range, which is not that steady (i.e. players may find the plants fading out if they keep the procedure running for a long time). Another thing is there’s no control set between the position and the growth direction of the leaves, and that may sometimes lead to some inaesthetic cross. All these above needs to be optimized when perfecting in the future.
My original idea is, to make some of the plants seem just sprouting, some show flourishes, some look like they need to be treated. In order to totally realise these, some more precise calculations, as well as a range control, are needed. In addition, in the future version, I’m thinking of adding an “Another one!” button as well as a picture base of previous plants, for players to produce as many plants as they like and to check what they have produced at any time.
If this can go further than a prototype, I may consider changing it to “Would you like a pot of electric plants?”, and both which kind of plants and how lush the plants the player will get is random. Special sounds of ‘electric’ plant growth may also be made applied to make it a more complete experience.