Plooms

Title Card
Floating Hubs to Place Plooms on
Cloud and Sun for Plooms to take care of the seeds
Ploom Placement
Playing outside on a terrace, picking up a ploom
Plooms on the first hub, title appears "Plooms"
A ploom plooming a new ploom surrounded by other plooms
a small ploom eating a froot
Final Staging Concept Art
Concept Art of a filled out scene

Inspiration

Our team was inspired to make a casual game that focuses on a character and their relationship with plants, and then multiply that feeling exponentially through an adorable army. Some games that inspired us were, Pikmin, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and Sonic Adventure: Chaos Garden. We loved the idea of panspermia and cellular automata, so we crafted a narrative set billions of years in the future. Life in the universe is dwindling down to its last planets, and our player and these little “Plooms” are all we have left. No pressure though they’re just happy to be here. It's the player's responsibility to help jumpstart the dying planets to "Ploom" life into the universe again through these Mice-celium-like pals. We hope players will find charge causing “ploom” reactions as they all trigger each other to power up ecosystems floating around in their living room.

Together we can Ploom again.

Building the Game

In building the game, we focused on creating basic interactions that the plooms would engage in, such as reproducing and farming their essential resources. Early feedback was overwhelmingly positive. There’s a magic in guiding numerous Plooms that have a childlike mind to their goals. Running around and following the player when carrying a piece of "Froot." makes you their space guardian. So we made building phase 1 all about farming. This feedback led to adding more interactions to enhance our story. For phase 2 of the game loop, we created hubs to generate more seeds and connecting rings to activate floating islands, illustrating their interconnection and an energy current powering other areas. Completing all islands triggers a final stage where a Grand Ploom appears, and the plooms depart to spread life across the universe, while some remain to continue the cycle.

This farming game loop and the scalable game board for placing Plooms to Ploomino effect into these runic crop-circle-circuits, is the core structure of our game.

Challenges

One of our biggest challenges besides being distracted by their charm, was fine-tuning the behavior of the plooms and the general logic for managing the islands. Determining the right progression for the game was critical, especially considering the scale of the game elements such as the number of plooms, seeds, and floating islands. Currently we are keeping these numbers low, but our goal is to eventually see a fully populated space where players can interact more extensively with the plooms and aid them in achieving a state where they can flourish independently.

Learning and Stretch Goals

The process of creating basic interactions and watching these little creatures seek resources and take care of themselves was undeniably fun and rewarding. Our stretch goals included: enhancing the idea of the “chain reaction” and designing levels around placing plooms for a story mode, and enhancing the space with more Quill Painted Models to augment the environment as much as possible in fast turn around. We used a floor spawner to add interest around your room and focused on using the entire play space effectively, from the ground up. Our aim is to create a loop where plooms help themselves, and the player helps them complete a fully self-sustaining ecosystem.

Conclusion

Overall, we enjoyed the process of creating and observing the interactions of the plooms. Helping them reach new heights and "Ploom" throughout the universe was a fun and engaging experience for everyone involved.