Hi! I’m Brady, and I finished my Devtober game! plant daddy is an eminently laid-back browser game about raising houseplants in your sunny Chicago apartment.

I wanted to make a small, tightly contained game, and Devtober lined up with those goals exactly. Glad to have participated!

What Went Right?

• Setting realistic goals / timeline: I was very careful in outlining this project to make sure that only the absolute minimum was included in the demo. Because I made the schedule early on and stuck to it, the game was finished in time!
• Getting extremely lucky re: aesthetics: I’m super happy with how the game ended up looking, but the whole aesthetic was a fluke, pretty much! Originally the game was designed in 3D, with a perspective camera. It looked terrible. I played around with different styles for days, until I accidentally hit the “2D” button in Unity’s scene editor. This switches the scene view over to the orthographic camera, and, for some reason, made everything look amazing. Why? Who knows! I don’t understand much about aesthetics, to be frank. I’m not an experienced 3D modeler, so my best guess is that my simple, boxy designs were somehow complemented by the orthographic camera.
• Not rushing into coding: a lesson I learned the hard way from past projects was to carefully map out features before I rushed into coding them. In particular, this means for me trying to guess how systems might need to be extended in the future.
• Also I really like how the plants look: damn I am happy with them.

What Went Wrong?

• Not Much Time For Playtesting: If I wanted to have time to get more playtests in, I needed to have booked at least a week for that. That didn’t happen. While I feel pretty happy with the flow of the gameplay, I can’t be too sure about the user experience yet! 
• No sound: sound is a crucial part of a game feeling alive! I didn’t block out time to add sound effects in! Again, there’ll be time for this in the full game, but it definitely leaves something to be desired for the demo.
• The game’s name is plant daddy: this is tragic indeed.

So anyways, thanks for reading this over! I’d like to thank Phoebe Thatcher for her botany advice, and Mack House and Pip Wasserburg for testing the game!

And please, give the game a look if you’re ready to father some young plants!