Game Design Prototype
Game Play
In this prototype, you trial and error your way through upgrading your lawn! You document your findings in your herbarium. It's a small educational experience of making learning about biodiversity and plants fun!
Process:
Through a concentric game design approach and a lot of iterations I went from a simple paper
prototype to a fleshed out prototype in Unity.
Paper prototypes:
In these prototypes I let the players choose which plants they wanted to plant in their garden. Depending on the growing conditions I would tell the player how well the plants grow. After some game play I asked them to decide what they think the correct growing conditions are for the plants.
This worked pretty well as the players already had fun putting plants everywhere and figuring out where they grow the best.
Simulating everything manually made the playtest's take a long time and made the results very varied as the results depended a lot on how I would explain the growth of the plants.
First paper prototype:
Unity prototypes:
I soon then moved to Unity and first implemented everything I had in the paper prototypes.
From there on out I focused on making the main gameplay loop of trial and error as intuitive and fun as possible.
What went well:
In the beginning, this project was a paper prototype. This was a really fun process as it let me experiment and iterate fast without needing to worry about coding it. Play testing this with players was really fun as well, as I was able to narrate the entire thing, give a lot of nuance on how the plant was doing and how it affected the lawn.
What I learned:
The transition from the paper prototype to a digital one did give me troubles, as a lot of the personal notes I threw in during the play tests weren't possible anymore. Additionally, a lot of the systems were more difficult for me to implement than I expected. So in the end I mainly focus on the feedback of the plants on how well they are doing and left out some other systems that I had in the paper prototype.