ALEXA
Game Developer & Artist
Plantasia
Plantasia is a cozy semi-idle, gardening game designed to sit at the bottom 1/3 of your screen so you can play in-between tasks without disrupting your work! Plant your seeds and watch them grow into beautiful blooms. Then, harvest them for materials and extra seeds. Use some of your seeds in the station lab to create hybrids, and grow new interesting plant types for better appearances and resource yields. Or, use your seeds to create bundles that will help you complete quests and acquire new blueprints to personalize your station!
Plantasia is designed to encourage play during small breaks, without disrupting your regular workflow as you transition in and out of other tasks. However, if the world of Plantasia and its secrets call to you, it is also possible to engage with the optional campaign - where deeper, more serious truths about the world are revealed.
Lead Programmer Role
In May 2024, I was brought onto the team as a regular programmer tasked to create the general planting loop. This consisted of a small inventory on the left hand side of the screen, grabbing a seed from this inventory, putting it into a planter, plant grows for a certain amount of time and then harvesting the plant. It was a huge task that was given to me only, with the only other programmer working on getting our 1/3rd screen, audio, and seed bank (which holds all core information about these seeds) to function.
What happened next though changed everything: I realized that I was doing all this work, but I wasn't really the right role title for it as a general developer. I pitched to our director this concern, who brought up that our lead developer at the time was struggling with this project, another project, and real life. He ended up stepping down and I stepped up to be the new lead developer. I was already familiar with the main systems... because I developed them!
I ended up bringing on two more team members who helped shape Plantasia into what it is today. But, I am so proud of what I worked on.
Growing Plants
Plant growing is one of the core game loops of Plantasia. Without it, many of our other systems would not progress at all. It's also the most complex system I have ever programmed. It has multiple factors that go into how the plants work. The first system is the plant information itself for over 500+ plants in the game.
I had to create a system that was modular enough that if the designer came in he could customize the information completely to create unique seeds with their own drop tables, information, IDs and more. Using a serialized class, each seed held it's own unique SeedID along with other important information such as plant images, resource drop tables, color, and other important information that the developers needed for their systems.
One example of a system that uses this system is the plant information tab, which shows all information about the plant as well as the affixes the plant holds which is also attached to the plant gameobject.
Plant Trigger System
Coming Soon!
Affix System
Coming Soon!
Alchemy Room
Coming Soon!
Audio Manager
Coming Soon!