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[noahwecker]

Hello everyone!
 
     This is my current project.  While its still in its early stages, I felt it would be a good idea to start a development blog to get feedback and keep me motivated.  The title is Grove Guardians.

Thanks for Looking!



Concept:
     Grove guardians is a forest floor building simulation and strategy game.  The player assumes the role of a forest spirit who has woken up from a deep sleep to discover its forest to be dead and barren.   Your goal is to regrow the forest floor, bring the grove back to life, and solve the mystery of what happened.  To do so the player must gather resources, plant new vegetation, and recruit allies to fend off invasive creatures.

Features:
Procedural-ish plant generation
Turn based combat
Pixel based planting system
Dynamic level difficulty

The Game:
     The heart of the game is  “sim-city” style gameplay with plants in place of buildings and ground cover ( grass, moss, lichens ) in place of zoning.  As opposed to a grid based system, I am going for a pixel based system.  More on that later.

     The game is divided into levels.  Each level consists of a central totem and surrounding ground.  The surrounding ground has various qualities which determines how suitable it is for different species of plants.  The goal of each level is to reclaim the totem for the forest by planting vegetation and recruiting allies .  This is all done using resources.  There are three types of resources in the game; essence, vegetable matter, and animal matter.  

     The types of vegetation planted will determine the types of allies and enemies a player will encounter.  The idea is that the more productive the player's ecosystem is, the more difficult it will be for them to fend off invaders.  

     Combat in the game will be turn-based with a grid style combat screen; similar to Dofus.  






Graphics and Technology:
     The game is in 3D.  I’m developing the engine in C++ using Ogre3D.   For the level of manual vertex generation and tweaking it seemed a good fit for me.  It also helps that I am a C++ fanboy.


Platform:
      I'm currently targeting the PC with a conscious effort for future porting to Mac and Linux.  The technology used and design should hopefully make this a relatively easy process.

Team:
     Just me for now!  I'm doing all of the art and programming.


And that’s about it.  I hope that’s not too confusing.  I hope to start posting updates and screenshots at least once a week so everyone can understand my vision a little better.

[archdrone]

Looks pretty cool. Looking forward to the procedural plant stuff.

[Nicholas Lives]

Dat GRASS, man.

Seriously though, lovin' the look of this so far. The title is also quite the eye-catcher for me personally. I get a pretty distinct picture in my head from that title, so it certainly serves its purpose I suppose! I look forward to seeing the aforementioned "guardians" of this grove!

[darthlupi]

It looks lovely.  I am very interested in how pretty a healthy environment will look.  What are you thinking for enemies?  Something natural or something magical like decay sprites?

[diegzumillo]

Shows promise! keep it up 

[noahwecker]

I appreciate all of the responses.  Definitely makes me motivated to start showing more of my progress.

Ground Cover

I wanted to show everyone how the ground cover engine works.  The terrain has a diffuse map and a soil quality map.  in the soil quality map the r,g, and b channels each refer to different qualities of the soil per pixel.  Red being how much moisture is in the soil, green being how much sunlight the soil gets, and blue being how deep the soil is.  When a player plants ground cover, depending on its type, the engine uses these maps to determine how much ground cover can grow at that spot.  So for instance, moss will grow well in dim, wet soil and grass will grow in well lit areas with deeper soil.  Here are some pictures to illustrate this better.





When ground cover is planted, it starts producing essence.  Essence is the most basic resource used to recruit allies, add plants, and plant ground cover.



Here is an example of the two current types of ground cover I have working ( moss and grass ).  Hopefully you can kind of see the essence pollen floating around, but I think I will have to post a video to show it better.  Stay tuned.  In the future I hope to be able to get ground cover also growing on objects and not just terrain.  The hope is to be able to grow moss and lichens on things like rocks and stumps.

[noahwecker]

It looks lovely.  I am very interested in how pretty a healthy environment will look.  What are you thinking for enemies?  Something natural or something magical like decay sprites?

Thanks! I'm hoping to post some pictures of a more completed "level" once I get the procedural-ish plant engine fleshed out a little bit.  My idea for enemies and allies is to mostly be naturally occurring creatures like bees, ants, and birds, but with an off chance to encounter things more magical.  I love the suggestion of a decay sprite as I immediately get of image in my head as to what they'd look like.

[Bakuda]

This looks awesome!  Excited to see what you do with it.