Overview
Pocket Plants is a third-person survival game that takes place on a planet overrun with invasive plants. While beautiful, these plants produce too much carbon dioxide to sustain other life on the planet. The player must gather plants and utilize propagation to save their suffocating ecosystem.
Level Two - Cliffs
First collectable mushroom in cluster next to puddle
Consideration: Narrative
I chose to approach the visualization of the intruding pollution through use of a cloud particle system placed at the mouth of the cave. The pollution resembles rolling fog as particles play through their lifespan and appear to encroach on the player’s starting position. The goal was to take advantage of the small size of the cave to bring about a feeling of slight claustrophobia.
Cliffside spanning the two caves
Consideration: Adding Risk
Up until this point in the game players have become accustomed to traversing contained spaces. The cliffside walkway is an attempt to add a risk factor of falling that forces players to alter the way they think about their movements. Additionally, the cliffside walls and ravine are used to drastically differentiate the space from those seen previously. The introduction of extreme heights provides opportunities for wow moments and adds complexity to the player’s mental map of the world the main character occupies.
Upon falling off the walkway mushroom boy will begin to ragdoll all the way down, resetting the level upon ground impact.
Consideration: Leading Lines
The introduction of the stalactites may have been a result of the desire for strong profiles, but it also led to a glowing opportunity to utilize leading lines. While the application is far from seamless, it still proved effective in testing. Combining rocks with stalactites produced a sort of emissive ore vein effect. The vein on the left successfully pushed players up the ramp, closer to the point of line convergence, while the central vein pushed them down through the narrow pass.
Consideration: Profiling
A big goal for me when experimenting with this level was to find different methods of drawing player focus and directing down a path. I found that the use of emissive stalactites in an otherwise dark space created a visually intriguing profile when set against the brighter cave entrances. A typical foreground and background contrast that lures players in.
