Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
A jam submission

Bonsai SimulatorView game page

A two week project submitted to PROCJAM 2024 about representing the real processes of tree growth and care.
Submitted by Ian Nacke — 9 minutes, 43 seconds before the deadline
Add to collection

Play game

Bonsai Simulator's itch.io page

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Comments

Submitted

This looks pretty cool. I wish I could play it fullscreen but it just shows a small rectangle for me.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback, and fixed the fullscreen ;)

Submitted

That was wonderful, very poetic. When I understood it was a full life cycle, I restarted a gen while listening to "Clair de lune" of Debussy for maximal melancholia effect, just to see... And it worked so well together, so well tears escaped from my eyes while this tree made of pixel danced in front of me before inexorably...dying.

I don't want *this* to end, why everything must always come to an end ?

Thank you for this moment.

Developer

Thank you for playing, I really appreciate your feedback! I'm glad you felt so strongly about your time playing :')

Submitted

While the trees in themselves looks pretty simple, getting them to go through a whole lifecycle was a cool trick and I definitely felt a little bit sad each one a tree I looked at its whole life ended up dying. Nice submission :-)

I wonder how the generation works here, since I got a few different- looking trees including thick-bodied ones and thinner, split-body growths like the one in the cover image.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing! The trees having a lifecycle was really just a byproduct of trying to simulate the growth process rather than the tree in a single moment. Originally I was hoping to incorporate some bonsai practices, like trimming and pruning. Since that didn't make it into the submission, they 'die' when the weight of their upper segments gets too great.

I'm glad you found the variety in tree type interesting. The code itself doesn't do a lot different, though I hope to expand on it in the future. For now, when an in game year passes the tree sheds it's leaves and its trunk gets a little thicker, just like in real life. But real trees develop their trunks at different rates and some are sturdier than others, so I did my best to include some of that variety, though hopefully in the future I can expand on that.