Plantasia is a cozy, semi-idle gardening game in a solar punk universe. As the Creative Director on this 15-month project, I had a hand in every aspect of development.
Initially, it was my vision that spawned the game. Inspired by the recently released game, Rusty’s Retirement, and a 2000s-era game called Plant Tycoon, Plantasia was created as a focus tool game meant to be played alongside work or school.
Drawing from my own neurodivergent experiences, Plantasia allows the player to have a healthy ‘distraction’ living on the bottom of their screen. This gives the player space to multitask work and play.
My vision for the game was to create a space for players that made them ‘feel’ good through customizable visuals to fit their own aesthetics and make them feel at home, interesting soundscapes that lack distracting lyrics and create a calm atmosphere, and gameplay that is simple to understand, surprising to unfold, and - most importantly - require as little attention from the player as possible to progress.
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The timeline for Plantasia was always meant to be short. Initially, I set a 6-month deadline, starting in April, when the core team had been successfully formed. Prior to that, it was just me during the Ideation Phase. We formed a small team of 6 during Pre-Production, and expanded that team for Alpha Development to 10. October was the original end date, but as we approached this deadline, I realized we needed more time to fulfill the vision of the game and thankfully the entire team was extremely passionate about the project and willing to extend their commitments.
Pre-Production was difficult. As a fully junior team working on our first commercial project, none of us had ever experienced a proper Pre-Production phase. We utilized educational materials and relied heavily on mentors to make our way through this phase. It wasn’t until near the end of Alpha Development that we realized we had mixed Pre-Production work with Development work, setting our timeline back significantly since we did not properly write documentation and did not manage to fully pre-plan all of Plantasia’s features. As the team leader, I saw the ramifications throughout Development manifest as scope creep, communication failures over features, long meetings, and an overall increase in development time.
During Alpha Development, it took a while for a playable build to show itself. The entire team was working entirely from scratch. We used no asset packs, no AI, and only one Unity package that was later scrapped and rebuilt in original and improved code during Testing & Polish. Yet, this stage was likely the most exciting one! I feel fortunate that the team was so dedicated so early on. Passion was a hiring requirement, and it felt, truly, during this phase, that this project could go all the way. I felt very strongly that each team member learn through doing, so they were all given freedom - within the vision's constraints - to explore their interests and focus on what they felt was important to include in the game. This created a deep connection between each team member and Plantasia and is the main reason the team stuck together for over a year.
Beta Development focused more on expanding outside of the core game loop: plant, grow, harvest. This is where we began adding the fun through systems like the Seed Splicing, Crafting, and Narrative. During this phase, I expanded the team again to a peak of 15. Such a number is considered large for an indie, but as our systems got more complicated, I wanted each team member to remain specialized in their area of interest. In the end, this created a team that was tight-knit, accountable, motivated, and consistent for over a year under volunteer circumstances.
The Steam Next Fest Demo was exciting! As the Founder, I handled Steamworks on my own. Having never done this before, there was a lot to learn. I’m happy to say our Steam page only got rejected and pushed back one time, and our Demo was only an hour late on release. Because of our large following within the professional game indsutry community, we were welcomed with a few handfuls of active players, and ones that were much more likely to join our Discord to give feedback and report bugs. Up until this point, I had failed to bring in QA or private playtesters, so we went into Next Fest knowing this would be Plantasia’s first introduction to anyone outside of the team. Thankfully, feedback was great! There were no game breaking bugs, and the overall response was very positive!