itch.io

Thanks for the great questions and I'm glad you like the premise so far.

Working on cohesive goals outside of merely watching grass grow, so to speak, has been one of our main concerns. On the one hand, it's already challenging and interesting to try to make your own garden, as the competition of plants behaves unpredictably. One plant will shadow another, and suddenly half of your garden's trees have died. On the other hand, it's also important to motivate you to actually create that garden and work with the plants, besides a vague prospect of a dream garden.

So here's a difficult exercise: how do you rely on plants to progress in the game in terms of new technology or resources, without relying on cultivation? Something we wanted to definitely avoid was industrialization or cultivation of plants merely for resources. We wanted to lean into the wild growth. Plants can be pruned or cut, they blossom and grow fruit. However, you can't make topiaries, as the plants will always grow wild and calculate what's best for them in terms of sun exposure, obstacle avoidance, etc. There's no way to bend the plants to your will completely -- working with and around them is the main goal.
Putting the "plant mechanics" to use in as many different interconnected ways as possible is something we're currently working towards.

Now, there are two ways to interact with the world in Idu: magic spells and crafting. Magic spells are used instead of tools, for picking up items by compressing them, or breaking down items such as concrete into sand. Crafting is used for making pumps, pipes, storage, and other similar things. Anything new we'd introduce would have to fit into this system.

Hence we introduced Converters -- file cabinets with antennas on top -- that have to be placed near flowers to work. At the moment, those antennas pick up "flower power" signals and convert things in their file cabinets into another resource. It's still experimental, but it already forces you to pay attention to the plants and tend to them differently. Because it's difficult to predict where the next flowers or shoots will be, you have to constantly prune the plants until there's enough "coverage" for the antennas to work.

There's lots of potential with similar ideas we'll be constantly experimenting with. We're thinking of tying the tech tree to Converters in some way, and introduce more ways to experiment with plants to enable progression in the game, without relying on farming mechanics.

Indeed, terraforming in terms of rebuilding everything and let the plants take over is a big part of the game. But letting the plants over is just really difficult without lots of strategical planning, construction of irrigation systems, and experimentation of how different plants behave with one another, especially as all of their needs are different.