Game idea: Gardening Simulator

Alright, I've heard of 'Farmville,'  so please don't remind me about it.  My official stance on Farmville is:  I don't care.  I don't care about Farmville.  I tried to play it for about a day and I stopped caring pretty quickly.  Which, of course is the death of any good farm and or garden.  You have to care.

I do, however, have a garden in my back yard.  I've got tomatoes, basil, marigolds, kale, chard, lemon cucumbers and yellow squash.  Or at least, I have the plants for them-- they haven't yielded much in the way of fruits.  Anyhow, I enjoy gardening.  It really isn't much different from certain types of gaming.   I think of tower defense, RTS, and Sim City.  You plant your units, you maintain your units against the ravages of enemies, bent on beating them to the ground.  Each unit has a different property, and many times they will require certain appropriate conditions to upgrade them and turn out different results.  

Gardening is very much like that.  The sun, while an important ally, is also an enemy.  It will dry out the plants and burn them.  You have to keep them steadily supplied with water in order to compensate for the heat of the sun.  However, it is important not to over manage the garden.  If you water too much, you will rot out the roots, and kill your plants that way.  The balance is delicate.  I can't say I've seen this feature in an RTS or other sort of game;  a way to overwater, or otherwise worry a unit to death.

Oh, here's a two dollar idea for you:  an app or a widget or whatever, for your phone or desktop, that is just a houseplant that you have to water.  Just a stupid, simple game to keep a person mildly entertained once a day, twice a day, however.  The benefit of a computer plant is that you can track your watering schedule.  In fact, the system could double as a tracking system for your own watering -- you just have to be consistent about feeding the virtual plant whenever you feed your actual plant.  It might work.  I certainly know I'm on my computer and phone way more than I spend time with my plants.

Another element of the garden is pests.  These buggers are... so buggery!  And it's really tough to combat them.  Marigolds have the property of being attractive to pests, and hardy.  So they can divert some of the bugs to eat them.  In addition, plants like Chard can usually take a beating from the slugs and the aphids.  They're hard to kill, and usually produce a lot.  But still, after all that, the fucking bugs can screw things up for my other plants, the once I want to eventually eat!  It's a really tough balance, too, because if you want to eat something, it's really probably not a great idea to cover it in poison.  But poison seems like the most effective method of driving the point across to those damned hungry bugs.  There's also ladybugs, and apple slices and eggshells and other products.  Nothing is perfect though.

And the bane of my existence, there are cats.  Fucking stray cats.  I love cats, don't get me wrong.  I even love strays.  But god dammit, I hate cat shit.  I hate it in my garden.  It smells bad, it's disgusting to think that a cat (probably my cat) is shitting around the tomatoes *I plan to EAT*  and to make matters worse, there's toxoplasmagondii.  Great.  It has a name; why I shouldn't eat plants sitting in cat shit-soaked soil.  Apart from 'ewwwww!'

Finally, there's the attention.  It is very easy to slip out of consistency with gardening.  Simply become distracted for a few days.  It's not hard-- I do it all the time.  Actually, a gardening tracker app would be useful to me when this happens, because I could pull up my phone and see my thirsty plant, and know it's been three days since I watered.  It's not an exact science, but it's pretty darn ballpark.

So that's it for this idea.  In summary, I would like a game that combines RTS and Sim City.  Choose a plot, clear it, fertilize, plant.  Water, fight bugs.  Harvest.  Find out what you did wrong.  Seems pretty simple to me, and I think it's a series of mechanics that can be refined to a deep level.  This is why I like the thought of making games:  I can combine learning about a thing, with trying to express it using programming systems and graphics.  Now I just need to work on that programming... And that graphics.

-D

Video Game Artwork

Who remembers fuse beads?  Perler Fuse Beads?  My younger sister had these when we were growing up and at some point I thought it'd be cool to use these to create video game related artwork.  I remember trying to create something that resembled the "Z" logo from A Link to the Past, although I don't have it anymore and I don't know if any pictures of it exist.

I got into cross-stitching back in the summer of 1994.  My older sister was starting to do it and I'd watch her after I got back from school.  I'd been playing Mario Paint for about a year at that point and while watching her stitch little X's onto fabric, I realized that I was basically doing the same with with Mario Paint's pixel creation portion of the game.  Dr. Potts actually was the wizard when it came to looking at in-game pixels and recreating them in Mario Paint.  If I remember correctly, he made two separate characters for the main character in Secret of Mana and was able to animate them to look like he ran in the game.

That summer of 1994, I decided that I would create a pattern, using the pixels from Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.  Specifically, from Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda, and A Link to the Past, with the Nintendo logo in the middle.  My initial plan was to have the characters facing each other with the Nintendo logo in the middle and a border of various items from the game and turn it all into a pillow.  At the time, Super Mario World and A Link to the Past were the most recent and current iterations of those various franchises (1990 and 1991 respectively).  I began this project back in 1994 and only last February 2012 did I finally complete the last item in the border.

If you follow the patter from the lower left corner to counter clockwise (New Link - Old Mario - Old Link - New Mario) that by the time it reaches around, that there's only once space between the pouch and chest from A Link to the Past.  The question of what to put in this square tied me up and kept me from finishing this project for almost 20 years.  Keeping in mind that I didn't map out and line everything up as it probably should have been, I think it turned out rather well, considering it was the first thing I'd ever cross-stitched.  You'll also have to forgive me for not having/using the correct color pallet in respect to Mario from Super Mario Bros.

Since then though, I've done a couple of other pieces that have incorporated either aspects of video games or used artwork from video games as a frame of reference.

Eternal Darkness (Gamecube)

I created the seven seal Protect Area sigil using the Mantarok sigil as the power source.  It's currently above the bedroom door.

Admittingly, this one turned out more pixelly than I had intended and I probably could have made it larger, but it was my first project in roughly 13 years.  I still don't have a frame for it yet.

Plants vs. Zombies
Each of these are about two inch squares.

The Konami Code

A pattern I created for Dr. Potts as a Christmas turned birthday present last year (2011 Christmas - 2012 birthday).

That's all I've made for the time being.  I'm not sure if I'll do anything this year as I want to focus more time on painting miniatures, of which I will most likely post pictures from that endeavor.   

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

It Happens All At Once

Can't_Stop_Playing!

Right now and through November 10th, Pop Cap Games and the American Dental Association have teamed up for this recent Halloween to offer Plants vs. Zombies as a free download.  This promotions purpose was to hand out free download keys to trick or treaters.  

The promotion (as well as the website) is aimed at children, but as everyone knows, children should all be supervised while online and before they download anything to their parents' computer.  So after you go to StopZombieMouth.com and enter the "PEAH8R" code, you'll be emailed a product key to activate the 40 MB file.

So aside from this awesome deal, why am I bringing up Plants vs. Zombies?  Because it was Halloween yesterday and I find the game incredibly addicting.  I first played it a little bit at PAX08, back when the Michael Jackson zombie was still around.  I didn't actually sit down and play the game in full until sometime in 2010 and I had bought it for Conklederp for her PortoMac.  I played it there and beat it after she had gone through on her own.  I then bought it for myself on my previous computer and beat it there.  I also purchased the soundtrack because Laura Shigihara did a fantastic job with the music.  Last Christmas (2011), Conklederp received a Kindle Fire and she bought it on that platform.  Playing on a touch screen was a little different than with a mouse, but it felt very intuitive and natural.  And now, with this promotion, I will now have played (and completed once I do) on four different computers.  I also used one of the Mac keys on my sister's computer and awesomely enough, got my niece Flan into the game; although she just like to watch the zombies have their head pop off from the lawnmower and giggled when:

Something about this game's combination of simple gameplay, art, sense of humor and soft, ambiet/melodic catchy music make it a game that I will play the shit out of until I get tired of it and once I can play it again on a new computer, or one that I haven't played it on yet, I will protect the shit out of my lawn.  You messed with the wrong home owner zombies!!

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Hunger Began In 1985