ADVANCED - Let it Grow

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Game Map
Player attacking enemies
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Let it Grow Story snippet

Clawdia has been tasked with taking care of the mystical Life Tree; an important life form burdened with keeping the world's fauna alive and well. Unbeknownst to her, however, enemies have been planning attacks and threatening the safety of the Life Tree.

Inspiration

We were inspired by the farming aspect of Stardew Valley and by the more stressful and unpredictable aspects of a roguelike game. We wanted to create a game that would be more relaxed during the day but then all hell would break loose once the sun goes down. We found the contrasting concepts to be a really entertaining direction for our project as we'd never really experienced anything quite like it.

Gameplay

As you start your day, you start by harvesting the crops in your garden. Then, with the money you've made from your harvest, you can visit the traveling merchant and browse his wares. He'll offer you seed packets that you can use to plant new crops to harvest at a later date, he will also sell you bullets and weapon upgrades, allowing you to once again defend the Life Tree against threats. Once the sun starts going down, enemies will begin spawning. Your immediate goal is to protect the crops you're currently growing, as those are your most significant source of income. However, you also want to keep the Life Tree alive. Should you fail, the game will unfortunately end. At the end of the night, threats will stop appearing but make sure to clean up any stragglers, as those could significantly lower your chances of surviving the next night by severely damaging the Tree. Just as you grow stronger day by day, so do your enemies...

Technologies

We used a GPU-accelerated 2D renderer library for the web called PixiJS. The library handled rendering our assets for the game. We used Typescript for the entirety of the project.

Challenges

We found that one of our greatest challenges was staying on track with the plan and not getting carried away with what we may have found to be more interesting or fun to add. We had to keep the scope limited because of the short time frame and this meant that we couldn't implement just any feature on a whim. On team is comprised of developers that enjoy making good things great, and we had to sometimes forgo that philosophy to really bring our idea to life.