Originally posted Jun 5, 2020, 11:15 AM

It's been awhile since I posted any progress on Protect Your Plant, the videogame I’m trying to make. The reason for that is scope creep, plain and simple. The next section of the map I’d set out to make included a hardware store with a park/garden center on its roof, and a church accessed through the park. I'd had a design for the hardware store pretty well built in my head (based on a parking garage in downtown Boston) so that went quick, but aside from a few things I knew I wanted to include, the park and church were open for new ideas.

So I added a water feature full of small stones which I'd have to cut out and place individually, and a dozen different unique plants.

But then, wouldn’t it be weird if the player has bugs or blight on them and is walking through these plants without affecting them in the slightest? Well, I'd planned on making crops interactable in the farming areas (they'd change with the seasons, and could catch bugs or blight, or infect the player if they had it and the player didn't) so why not do that here?

So then I was writing code and designing a plant node which could later be instanced, which would change with the seasons, track whether it was flowering, which could get sick, sicker, and eventually die if the player infected it, and which would pass the bug infestation or blight to its neighbors.

Once that was working reliably, I had to go back, take each of the unique plants I'd thrown around the park and make up to four seasons and three sickness variations of their sprite for each. Then place each one in the game, and get all its sprites scaled appropriately.

So that's all to say that the park and hardware store exterior are done, the plants are interactable, and I'll post a video of what that looks like later on.

I've already got the plants set up for when I've added randomly-pathing animals to the game. Certain animals will eat certain plants, bees will interact with plants that are currently flowering, and remember their locations to make return trips, and I'll experiment with the unfairness of animals and humans carrying bugs or blight on themselves and spreading them to plants without any control/input from the player.