Treevolution

Developed in 2 days for the Global Gamejam 2023

Summary

Gameplay

A lone seed is planted, and has to reach onto minerals to grow into a strong tree. The player must help the tree before a forest fire destroys its time on earth. The player must help the tree grow... From underground!
The player can use water to make the tree stronger and bigger, and mineral to make the recolection of resources easier.

The game is a clicker game where time and productivity is of essence.
Two rocks are available for collection, one for water-points to make the tree grow stronger and one for making the player's tools better, such as increasing the effectiveness of picking up rocks and the clicking power to break harder rocks.
There are seasonal events, they mostly change how the tree uses its resources, such as making the next tree-growth stage be cheaper to buy with water-points. But one seasonal event is a forest fire which hurts the tree overtime.

My work

I was the main programmer on this project, for the lack of time I also did prototypes, and made a quick half of the UI including its behaviour.
The entire project had to be incredibly simple as the delivery time of the gamejam was 2 days. I mostly made quick behaviours to ensure we could deliver on time. The rock behaviour was simple, I made a quick "button" behaviour for non-UI elements such as the treeseed, and the rocks. I also made a simple behaviour to pass time and when that time is over then the game would start a seasonal event which lasts over a minute.
My favorite addition was the first good use I did for a recursive behaviour for the roots to expand, one behaviour to make the tree roots grow new roots and another behaviour to make all previous roots grow thicker and go from green to dark brown.

Level design

The level design was simple, there are just 4 elements on the screen:
-A tree seed with roots
-Blue rocks
-Purple rocks
-A button to access an in-game store
The tree seed uses blue rocks (water) to grow, the player can speed up the growth stages by mining the purple rocks (mineral) to get more resources.
Every time the tree grows actual roots come out of the seed, and more and bigger minerals appear. The height of the roots also made minerals spawn even more deeply underground, as if the roots were uncovering them.

My experience

This experience was hard as it was my first industry-crunch, by that time I only had had crunch to deliver school projects which have been way shorter than a full game.
I participated in the jam with Jacob Parra, and Mateo Gutierrez, two great friends and developers. Mateo was busy because he had school, he did help with the UI elements, so most of the work was done by Jacob and I. We had turns to sleep (for over 1 hour each sleep time). The kitchen was a mess as we did not take time to clean so we could keep working.
There was a moment we were out of food, and energy drinks, so I went to the store to clear my mind as I was solving a bug but I was so tired to solve it. It was a trippy experience as I was zombie-walking, almost as if I was appearing up every 30m (100ft) and then I already had all the items I needed from the store in my bag (and my ticket, thank god). After being at the store I spended some time staring at nothing, I do not even remember at what. I did solve the bug after that.
Then I learned about a Unity build error in a bad way, it spooked me as we were about to deliver the built game but Unity threw me errors. The error is for using "editor" libraries on the scripts and I did not knew that at the time. Mateo did solve it when he came to help with the last steps.