For a long time I've wanted to make a GPS gardening game (for health!) plant virtual plants in real locations & walk back later to harvest them. Basically "farmeville Go"
The big stumbling block? Farming games need a ton of little plant icons and I'm a slow and not very good graphic designer.
Could procedurally generated sprites be the answer to my laziness?
Maybe?
I like this, but I also think part of the fun of a farming game is the graphics...seeing what grows ...
@futurebird I don't have a huge dog in this fight (IDK if I'd do this because gardening is a very, very occasional thing for me), but... guerrilla gardening?!
Challenge: Plant something native in the median of a major street in your neighborhood!
When I really about the game I realize it could be more educational if it used real plants, and if you had to take into account good planting locations...
Why not have the plants attract various insects...
Though, I'm just making excuses to avoid the suffering of getting the core gameplay working & finding out if it's fun or not.
The point is to make loot box loops work to get people exercising, not wasting money or doom-scrolling...
If games can be addictive can they be addictive for good?
@futurebird Another approach: use real real plants. Pull from the iNaturalist dataset. Scan plants to identify them and add them to your virtual goody box to assemble food or medicine. At higher levels, you get a higher score for quickly and accurately scanning the plants you need with fewer misses. It would teach plant identification, traditional uses, spotting them, remembering their locations, an appreciation of your environment, and maybe urban foraging.
@futurebird
You need to feed your family and keep them healthy, so that establishes your basic goals. Maybe you're helping to forage for a community that grows and evolves over time?
@futurebird
At one point I was looking at doing something similar with a zombie game that would involve physical movement--scouting, carrying messages, etc, similar to Zombies Run but with a community aspect and the ability for a game master to inject new elements. ("R&D just figured out how to boost transmitter power. Here are the parts your community needs to scavenge or trade to do it." "Work together! We need help moving these packages of virus samples across the country.")
@futurebird there's a whole genre of games which are "manage government policies to combat fossil-fuel-driven global warming". I've never played any of them; the genre developed after my love for games was killed. But the same principles could be applied to a game about managing a garden, or a game about replanting a wildlife conservation area.
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