Description
Bomber-man meets cellular automata in this 4 person death match. Made in collaboration with Gabrielle Pala. Brutal Botany takes place at the yearly botany convention for ground-breaking and leading botanist. Each year they compete in a death-match sowing off their latest innovations in the botanic world.
Brutal Botany was an expanded prototype of Gabrielles earlier Pico8 game. I was in charge of programming and level design with Gabrielle responsable for all the art and animation. The game was showen at BIC Fest in Busan, South Korea.
Information
• Genre: Local Multiplayer, Bomberman-like
• Platform: PC, Mac
• Engine: Unity
• Status: Unreleased
• Role: Programmer & Level Designer
Highlights
• Porting the core mechanics from the Pico8 game to Unity
• Showing the Game at BIC Fest in Busan 2015
• Building a custom player facing level editor.
Feature Breakdown – Cellular Automata
Using cellular automata as a gameplay element was a great challenge. We expanded the original mechanics to include 4 different attacks that all used cellular automata in some way. Each attack had to work within the rules of the world, plant a seed in a hedge for it to grow.
However, we found that games that went long would consume all the hedges, this meant that players couldn't attack one another. To fix this we made it so most attacks would also spawn additional hedges, or tiles that were cleared now would slowly sink. This gave the players more than enough space to play with the mechanics while adding danger by consuming the play space.
Falling in the water was an instant death.
Falling in the water was an instant death.
A few other notable problems were insta kills in water, the solution was an auto jump of 2 tiles for the player. A custom tile rule was written to update all the tiles so they connected and looked like continuous hedges. And players getting stuck in hedge pockets, the solution was a small player attack that can be used to push enemies into water or break through hedges.
