Crafting plants is tough, but I found a different kind of reward

This week I set out to flesh out the plants, but I ran into various walls along the way and didn’t get far on the plant details. However, I did make some discoveries at a more fundamental level.

As for progress, it’s all in the video above. I think I managed to create a really pleasant experience of walking while interacting with the grass. But what I originally set out to do was “refine the plants,” and in the end, the only one I properly worked out in detail was this one slightly tall species of grass. How did this happen?

Working Out the Plant Details

In a previous post I made rough illustrations, and this week I started building out the plant details based on them. I began with the slightly tall plant here, for now.

But the first wall I hit was: what would an appealing plant with this shape even look like? As I wrote before, I wanted to make something like coral, or plants with their own unique worldview and interpretation, like those in GRIS… and after a lot of thinking…

I finally settled on this direction.

I got as far as making the model, and while I like how the shape turned out, I also feel like something is missing. Anyway, that’s as far as the plant refinement got.

How Should Players Enjoy the Plants?

More than that, by making a plant and actually planting it in the field, a number of things started to bother me. I think it’s also related to the fact that when I made the player touch this slightly tall plant, it felt much better than I expected. In the first place, how do I want players to enjoy this plant that reacts when touched? Right now you get that good feeling by bumping into it with your whole body, but that action itself feels somewhat unnatural…

If this grass existed in real life, I think the way to enjoy it would be “reaching out a hand as you walk and enjoying the way it curls around you.” And then it suddenly occurred to me: with the low grass I had implemented beforehand, there’s nothing unnatural about the situation where “just walking triggers a reaction,” so it never bothered me. In Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, walking on snow tramples it and leaves tracks. Likewise, the experience I want this game to offer is “nature that reacts to walking, or to the bare minimum of movement.” The animals that gather when you rest, from last time, also fit that concept, though I wasn’t consciously aiming for it. But with this tall grass, I feel that having it react just from walking is unnatural. That’s because, unlike low plants, large plants are usually something you want to avoid when they’re in front of you, since they get in the way. As I wrote earlier, a light touch is just right. So… can I create a “light touch” action? I didn’t find an answer to this question this week. I’m carrying it over to next week and beyond.

Discovering “Walking”

Also, from the perspective of “enjoying contact with plants,” I felt that the movement I’d had so far, based on running, wasn’t a good fit, so I changed the default movement to walking. I also added a feature that makes the feet follow the slope and fine-tuned it. The result was a level of walking realism I hadn’t had before. The previous walking and running felt like nothing more than “getting from place to place,” but the current action somehow matches my intuition. Through the controls, I got the sensation of actually walking along a mountain path. I didn’t make much progress on the plant work I’d planned to do, but as a byproduct, I feel I’ve found a sense of wonder that is tied to the game experience itself. I’m glad.

With this action as the foundation, I’d like to really dig into building out the plants this time.