Hi there! This is the Devlog for my game, The Alchemist's Greenhouse!

Engine

GameMaker Studio

Concept

You are the student of a renowned alchemist and potion-maker. At last, she's decided you're ready to start growing and breeding plants yourself and has given you your own greenhouse. Your job is to selectively breed plants from the stock seeds you've been provided, and grow the magical plants your mentor has described to you.

Gameplay

You have a greenhouse with plant pots and bags of seeds to plant in them. Each seed has randomly selected variables for each of its characteristics (e.g, height, size of leaves, number of fruits, etc.). You can take cuttings of plants and then combine two cuttings in an empty pot to create a new plant with some mix of the two 'parent' plants' characteristics. You're provided with target plants to create from your available seeds. There are some vague ideas for more complex features such as mutations, story, and doing alchemy with the target plants you create, but I'm going to ignore those until I've got the basic features implemented.

Day 1!

Today was spent putting together placeholder art and programming some of the very basic features, like planting seeds, having plants spawn with random heights, being able to select plants, and being able to discard plants to free up pots. Screenshot of how the game looks at the moment (middle plant selected):

The bar at the bottom is hopefully where the cuttings from plants will go, and the object to the right of that is the compost bin where plants get discarded. The mysterious floating object in the top left is the seed bag.

Tomorrow I'm looking to implement cuttings and hopefully then breeding!

Day 2!

Not much was achieved today due to tiredness, but the plants can now be converted into cuttings and the cuttings will 'remember' the heights of the plants they were taken from. You can also now select up to two cuttings from the bar, but you can't actually do anything with them yet. That'll be the next step!

The floating numbers are the 'heights' of the plants and the cuttings, and basically just for my own reference so I could check everything was working as intended. They'll get removed before the game is released. (0 is short and 1 is medium! The first target plant will just be a tall version of the starting plant.)

Day 4!

Plants can now be bred with each other, in that tried and tested manner of shoving two cuttings together in the same pot. I am entirely sure that is how plant breeding works.

Several new features have also been introduced, including:

• Dispose All: clicking on this will automatically remove all plants in pots.
• Target: Creating the plant shown in the target window, clicking on said plant and clicking on the target window will not only unlock a new target, but also a new seed type!
• Related to the above: a new seed type! In addition to having a height variable, the new plant has a varying number of leaves: no leaves, some leaves and many leaves. Plants having leaves really helps with the whole 'looking like plants' thing. The new seed type will only produce tall or medium plants, and plants with some or many leaves. (Hence the target being short with no leaves.)
• Mouse-over tooltips to describe cutting variables briefly existed until the second plant was introduced, at which point it became one of many bug casualties. Looking to fix them soon.

• Menu
• Tutorial of some sort (the UI as it is isn't terribly self-explanatory)
• More plants with more variables!
• Story?
• Saving and loading?
• A larger cutting storage which cuttings can be moved into from the six-slot bar and vice versa? (Unsure if the game will ever really require it)
• General polish (redrawing art assets, messing around with scale, background, tweaking UI, etc.)

Day 11!

I'm still working on this, I just lost a few days from life happening and then didn't feel like I had enough for a devlog update.

New stuff:

• Mouse-over tooltips for the cuttings are back, so you actually know what you've got stored.
• The pot to plant proportions have been altered so they look better, and I took the opportunity to redraw the plants. They're still placeholders, but they're a bit less ugly now.

• Clicking on the pot will also select the plant! Seems like an obvious feature to have but I didn't realise it until somebody playtested my game and got confused when clicking on a pot with a plant in it did nothing.
• There is now a menu. The most favourable thing that can be said about it is that it's functional.

• I've also implemented a tutorial consisting of floating boxes that tell you to do things. My feelings about it are similar to those about the menu.

Possible future stuff in vague order of priority:

• At least one new plant, if not two. I'm pretty happy with everything else at the minute so I'd just like to make some more actual game content before the game jam ends.
• Draw more stuff: a greenhouse background so you're no longer just floating in a white void, art for the menu that's somewhat more representative of the game than a black void, prettier UI.
• A menu you can access from inside the game.
• Implementing drag and drop instead of just clicking on things because that seems more intuitive (and it would be a good thing to learn how to do).
• Helpful tooltips that tell you what stuff does.

Day 13

Drew a background so the greenhouse bit of the title is more accurate now. Managed to implement a third plant, so in the last day I'm just hoping to make stuff look prettier.

If I have the time I'd like to make clouds drift by in the background. c:

And it's submitted! Thanks to everyone who suggested stuff and gave their support!