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[Zaphos]

Hi!  I'm making a game about being a tree.  My friend Ghost of Electricity is doing the music and sounds -- check out his work on bandcamp, it's pretty good stuff

Currently I'm calling the game

How to Be a Tree

Basically, I just added physics to an L-System demo, and found it was just really fun to play around with, so I've been trying to make it into a game.

It's tricky to control, but if you know what you're doing you can start to really leap around.


The movement also lends itself to shimmying through narrow spaces:
 

Lately I've been focusing on adding other characters, like these little dudes that you can push around:

The dudes keep giving me Box2D woes; I'll probably have to start a technical thread about them.
They just keep getting stuck on the tree

And I just added these mouths last week:


I'm hoping to add a bunch more entities in the coming weeks.

I'm also hoping to let players play as other tree shapes, too.  Technically almost any L-System can be played, but it's a challenge to find ones that look good and play well.

Anyway, that's probably enough giant bandwidth-hogging gifs for now.  I'd love to hear thoughts and suggestions!

[Conker534]

"trees dont move"

sold

[diegzumillo]

Hilarious! and I love physics based game mechanics, that looks pretty fun.

did I mention I love this?

[eigenbom]

zaphos i love you and trees!

[CasePortman]

All my dreams have come tree!





*true

[psyguy]

This is awesome!  I want to suggest using the color of the leaves as a health indicator.  Green leaves are full health, autumn leaves are medium health, and the leaves all fall off when you are almost out of health. 

[jiitype]

Wasn't expecting this when I clicked this thread.
The movement looks amazing, how do you actually control the tree?

I love you, tree.

[jO]

Oh my, this looks really cool.
/following 

[kyleo]

That tree is missing roots. Any plans on elaborating on the cohesion-tension theory of water transport?


Love those mouths by the way-- really interesting gameplay!

[Erichermit]

This game looks hilarious, I love it. How unapologetically bizarre!

[Mauricio Gomes]

That sound so bizarre, and so cool.

I wish I had that idea

[Reaper]

Great idea, and I love the design - very easy to get this thing viral. Even the first sentence in the game is already funny and gets me hooked 

[Chis]

I freaking love this, amazing physics! my only crit is that the dialogue is unnecessary and ruining the joke imo.

[Mauricio Gomes]

I freaking love this, amazing physics! my only crit is that the dialogue is unnecessary and ruining the joke imo.

I think it is the EXACT opposite, the dialogue makes the joke funny.

I would not think the game was funny at all, just weird, if it had no dialogue.

[t-recx]

This looks great! 
I'm the #1 fan of peanut butter simulator, by the way.

[Zaphos]

Wow, thanks so much for all the nice comments!  Super motivating to hear that people like it

This is awesome!  I want to suggest using the color of the leaves as a health indicator.  Green leaves are full health, autumn leaves are medium health, and the leaves all fall off when you are almost out of health. 

Ooh that's a cool idea!  I already have a bunch of ways to die that don't lend themselves to that (like getting chomped) but I could definitely see experimenting with some desert-like area where your leaves dry up and you die unless you get to water.

The movement looks amazing, how do you actually control the tree?

With the arrow keys (or wasd or controller joystick) -- up contracts the branches, down spreads them out, left and right rotate them left or right.

That tree is missing roots. Any plans on elaborating on the cohesion-tension theory of water transport?

I was actually going to have retractable roots initially! ... but they haven't really seemed necessary for the gameplay yet.  Still, maybe one day!

I freaking love this, amazing physics! my only crit is that the dialogue is unnecessary and ruining the joke imo.

Aw.  Does it help that the dialog in the top gif is completely skippable?  (It's just what happens if the player doesn't do anything at all at the start of the game.  There are probably going to be even longer pauses between the lines, in-game ...)

I'm still playing around with ideas for how the game will be written / how much writing there will be, but there will probably be at least some dialog.

I'm the #1 fan of peanut butter simulator, by the way.

Haha, yay

[Chis]

idk, I think the title is sufficient to convey the joke, and the dialogue just overplays it. maybe because I've already played a couple of big brother-esque games, or I'm just too old and crotchety to appreciate the humor.

yes, having the dialogue be skippable helps a lot :-) (for old and crotchety people like me)
and in any case, the gameplay still looks awesome!

[Conker534]

I freaking love it, but I guess a skip feature solves all of the problems :D

[Prinsessa]

I don't know why I'm so goofy right now, but I laughed just from seeing the title of this thread. The GIF's in the OP helped. Looks like fun!

The mechanics with the mouth enemies are fantastic.

[ephoete]

For the very first gifts I was like "alright another guy who's playing with a physics engine".... And then I saw the dulls and the moving dentures.... And I was in!

Really cool stuff. Looking forward to knowing a bit more of the gameplay.