Category: groworld
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Gameplay balancing and emotional turmoil
Balancing is where you tweak games to get the right level of difficulty – doing this on a single player game is hard enough, but on a live game with active players its quite tricky. Germination X is currently too easy, which results in plants happily growing packed closely together (blocking subsequent players from planting)…
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Germination X: Game design in pieces
The current focus for Germination X is encouraging collaboration between players, with the subjects of pemaculture and companion planting deeply interwoven into the gameplay. It’s important to avoid the normal problems with “educational games” where the subject matter is bolted onto some existing game. This is rarely a successful strategy. Firstly players now are grouped…
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Germination X: player progression and surprises
Slowly Germination X gets less like a prototype and more like a full game, lots of new stuff this week – as this is the first online release of the work done over the past month. Players can now pass items of fruit to each other or spirits as gifts (by dragging fruit over messages…
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Germination X – designing for cooperation
Over the last week I’ve been designing and implementing a lot more game mechanics for Germination X which are needed for an upcoming visit to the Mobile Life Lab in Stockholm. The more interesting ones involve some direct player – player interaction. The thing I’m trying to balance is keeping the central design simple (what…
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Lirec meeting in Bamberg
Last week was another Lirec meeting in Bamberg, where I was able to present an in depth description of how Germination X works. I also had the chance to talk with SICS/mobile life lab (one of the other project partners) about how we can take the game forward with the aim to provide some studies…
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GX – messages, colours and continuous worlds
A big update for Germination X today. The main new stuff includes: The process of moving around the world is now more continuous, as the land is split into sub-tiles that are loaded 9 at a time. When you move out of the central tile the 3 at the back are discarded while the 3…
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New plant spirits and dandelions
A large part of the recent work on Germination X has been finalising the character design for the plant spirits. We need something which can exhibit some connection with the permaculture plant layer the spirit represents along with a way to express emotions with the restrictions of the browser platform. This is an image from…
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Isometric engineering
The first report from south western Sweden where I am on unofficial residency/hacking retreat in the environs of the Tjärnö Marine Research Laboratory. This is a great place for my main task, to focus on Germination X, and I’m starting with new isometric ground tiles. I’m aiming for the feeling of roots and interconnectedness with…
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GX companion planting diagnosis
Finally the spirits in Germination X can provide some kind of help by diagnosing what is wrong with your plants if they get ill, and sending you a hint via a small message. They also look for other players who can plant seeds and ask them to help you. All the actions being driven by…
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Messages from plants and plant spirits
In Germination X plants can now send messages to the players that planted them – and these are stored individually for each player as well as globally so you can see what other people are up to. Plant spirits can also send you messages when they see something happening that interests them (such as a…