Originally posted Jun 5, 2020, 3:24 PM

Protect Your Plant's level The New Downtown now contains a park and the plants are alive!

The park was a time-consuming place to start. I'd originally planned to set these 'live plants' up in farms and gardens throughout the city and survivor zones, which would have used much-less-varied plants (I could probably get away with two sets of sprites for each type of plant and just paste them over and over again) but it'd be weird if some areas of the map were interactable and others weren't, and it's be more of a pain to go back and pull out each plant sprite later on, so doing this now was probably the right move.

If the engine can handle packing in even more stuff, I'd eventually like to add a tilemapped weeds system, where certain plants pop up where conditions (sun and rain exposure) are good, the start of a real environment in the game world. But that might have to wait for a less image-heavy level, as this one already chugs a bit on loading. As is, I'm thinking about slapping down a few more pictures and colliders to cover the edges of the map, adding some loading gates, and starting a new level early. I'm not sure I can make these as big as I'd planned, for as busy as they are.