PLOT-A-PLANT

My main role on this team was gameplay designer. My responsibility in this role was to design and implement gameplay mechanics to help teach a user to care for their houseplants.

• Design: After discussion with experts, we boiled down the day-to-day care of real houseplants into a set of core tasks. These tasks are balancing acts, such as making sure the plant has enough water, but not so much that it becomes waterlogged. Balancing water, sunlight, temperature, and the pH level of the soil are all essential to keeping a plant healthy.
  My design for gamifying these tasks was to create an idle-style game where the level of different meters would change overtime corresponding to given inputs. I picked two factors--water and sunlight--to implement in this prototype as a proof of concept for the idea. The player would be given a watering can and a light control slider to interact with the in-game plant. Left alone, the water meter would decrease overtime, while the sunlight meter would change to reflect the amount of light let into the scene. It is up to the player to check up on their plant and keep these meters balanced, adding water and changing the lighting of the scene as needed.
  To accomplish the goal of teaching the player to care for real houseplants, the game would tune the update speed of the meters to match as closely as possible the real-life needs of the specific plant owned by the user. The game would notify players about the needs of their in-game plant, and this in turn would also serve as a reminder to care for their real plants.

• Implementation: After the initial design work was done, it was straightforward to implement these meters into a game project. For each meter (water and sunlight in this prototype), a progress bar would indicate the status of that meter, and there would be a player action mapped to each one. A draggable watering can with a particle spawner was used to interact with the water meter, and a slider bar that controls the scene lighting was used to interact with the sunlight meter. When both these meters were balanced, the plant would be in a healthy state, represented by full colors and lively animations. When one or more meters were out of balance, the plant would reflect this in the artwork.

Other responsibilities:

• I worked with our team’s game engineer to construct the gameplay in Unity. Using temporary assets, we built out the meter functionality as well as the player actions (watering can and light controls)

• I worked with the game artists on our team to get their assets (background art and spine animations) working correctly in the game. This required me to learn the basics of Unity’s Animators and the spine animation package.