Tender Green Things

Demo engine
Mockup

Gamify Vulnerability

Despite having such helpful mentors on board, how many of us hesitate to ask for help? To get on call? Despite having some of the cutest and most helpful mental health apps at the tip of our fingers, how many of us hesitate to download them?

While working for to build mutual aid networks at the beginning of the pandemic, we discovered that it's easy to get people to offer up help in times of crisis. Not so easy, however, is getting people to feel comfortable _ asking _ for that help. We live in a world that punishes expressions of vulnerability, even as they are the bread and butter of our collective survival. So, we developed a game where it is impossible to succeed without asking for assistance from other players, to teach the skill of asking for help when you need it.

It’s inspired from Animal Crossing and it is the antithesis of Among Us.

Tender Green Things lets you live out your cottagecore fantasy, while slowly pushing you to ask for help and grow both your garden and your network.

Gameplay

Tender Green Things is a farming sim placed in a world after an environmental catastrophe. The soil is irradiated, weather is unpredictable, and seeds are hard to come by. By carefully tending your garden, you can carve out temporary reprieve from these conditions.

The core game loop is a simple GARDEN SIM with a slow but steep difficulty curve. Flowers yield nectar, which offers temporary relief from environmental damage (but are fragile and fussy), Vegetables can absorb radiation and heal the other plants around them (but eventually rot if not consistently tended to), and Trees offer long-term protection from the environment (but only once they're grown). Simple temporary structures can also be built to offer protections from wind and rain. Meanwhile, the weather rages and the background radiation rises. No player will start with enough resources to last long on their own.

The secondary game loop involves sending, passing, and responding to MESSAGES. The players farm has a mailbox, and although the postal service is long defunct (RIP) you can still exchange messages with RANDOM PLAYERS. To begin with, this will be a background loop- your main interaction with it will be to receive messages that you can only help with by forwarding them on to other players. This is also a vector for delivering story content- some messages in circulation are just letters or poems seeded by the dev team. This loop on its own enforces a theme of community participation.

Eventually, after struggling with their garden, every player will achieve the resources necessary to write their own messages, and at this point the two game play loops MERGE. Once you send out a message asking for help (a certain resource, a kind of seed), it will be put into circulation, randomly bouncing around other player's inboxes until someone responds with help. There is no way to directly address another player except for by responding to their messages, but if you offer help you get a temporary reprieve from certain weather, and down the line you can receive other boons. Resource disparity will be distributed in such a way that a message should reach someone who can offer help within two to three jumps. If there are not enough players, the game will have a chance of just fulfilling the request automatically after enough time has elapsed.

With sufficient protection from the elements and dutiful tending, you can eventually grow the final _ golden orchid _. When it blossoms, it turns into a new kind of mailbox, with which you can send thanks and extra boons to everyone whose help you received along the way.

How I built it

Very little of the mechanics of the game are complete, but we have a wire frame of the core loops, and we have the engine for the farming sim built most of the way out. The engine runs in pure javascript on the browser. No server-side work has been completed,

Challenges

Our two-person team lives on opposite sides of the world! We had to work separately, with very little overlapping time when we were both awake. So, we split work between designing the engine and designing the UI. Without time or resources to pull it all together, what we're left submitting is just the haziest impression of the idea.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

That being said! I think this has a lot of potential as an idea! I'm proud of the concept, and on a smaller scale I'm proud to have figured out how to implement a farming sim from scratch in like twelve hours.