Hey all, Brendan here with an update on Space Botanist! For this dev log post, I'll be introducing you to the botany system at the heart of Space Botanist.

Space Botanist tasks the player with crossbreeding plants to discover fun, emergent behaviours between plants and the world they inhabit. With this in mind, we carefully considered how plants function to ensure they interact with adjacent system smoothly & consistently.

As botany is the name of the game (at least for now!), the botany system is intrinsic to the core gameplay loop with 2 of the 4 stages dedicated to the system: Research & Create

Fundamentally, all plants in Space Botany are procedurally generated using four types of modular components: Stems, Leaves, Flowers & Fruit. Every plant will have one stem emerging from the ground, several leaves and either a flower or fruit at the top of the stem.

RESEARCHING PLANTS 

This modular approach to designing plants has an especially significant role to play in the botany system. Under the hood, every plant will have a range of "plant stats" that determine what they need to grow healthy & how they act on their surrounding environment with the modular plant parts (combined with colour, texture & size) representing these stats.

You do not have to rely on visual cues alone to research your plants! Players will also be able to use the player character's Home Lab to get a detailed breakdown of plants stats or they can taste-test the seeds to get an estimate of the plant's properties!

STATS

In early versions of the design, we used a conventional stat system, not dissimilar to RPGs, that determined a plant's attributes

• A plant would have a point pool of 30 points. 
• A plant would have six distinct stats with a scale from 1 to 10. 
• The 30 points would be distributed amongst the stats to create a unique plant.

Although this was effective, we identified some issues & opportunities to improve the design. At such an early stage of the design process, we did not fully understand what kind of behaviours the plants would have yet and recognised that: 

1. Some of the ideas for stats did not allow for emergence. We needed to reconsider what some of these stats were and how they interacted with plants, the player & the game world. 

1. As we were drawing inspiration from the rules of real botany, we discovered some plant attributes were proportional or inversely proportional. 

Currently, instead of six distinct attribute scales, every plant has five stat spectrums with a distinct attribute at each end of a spectrum. 

For now, we will leave you with the attribute names and we will show off how some of these attributes work down-the-line (Or look forward to experimenting and discovering the stats yourself when the game releases next year!). 

CREATING PLANTS 

Now that I've introduced the stats and how they can be identified, let's have a look at growing new plants!

For crossbreeding, we have developed a formula for plants to mix-and-match their stats to create a new set of “child” stats. These inherited stats are carried in the seeds produced by the parents which the player can then use freely. This formula is carefully designed to be consistent, however, there is a small chance that mutations may occur during pollination...

To get consistent results (and make the process a little more interesting) we designate stats as being dominant or recessive. This helps us decide a stat’s value when both parents’ stats have equal weighting. 

That's all from me for today! I hope this gives you a little insight in to how we're handling the botany system and I'm looking forward to talking about more game design stuff later in development!

Brendan

Check out our last dev log post here with a first look at Concept Art!
Or take a look at our next post here to see some early development!