Flowers of Life

Introduction

Flowers of Life is an ecosystem based management game, this project was made during my third year of my game design bachelor.

A prototype of the game can be downloaded on the itch.io page of the game.

Pitch

In Flowers of Life, give birth to a world filled of creatures animated by many behaviours. Lead them, feed them and create new species to grow and keep balance in their world !

Game concept

Flowers of Life is a game based on an ecosystem full of little creature that the player will need to oversee to help it expands. To do so, the player has multiple tools on his belt, one of which is the species creator, a powerful tool that the player can to use to expand the ecosystem, to install equilibrium and much more…

Game mechanics

The entities

The enities are the base ground of the game, the core system of the game. They are simple creatures ruled by a basic ai. They will simply feed if they need to, then reproduce if they can and avoid their predators.

Those entities evolve trought their lives, from being an egg, or a childish creature, to being old and weak. In each state of their evolution, their capacity changes.
For example, while they are young, they are slow, when their are adult they can start to reproduce and their speed is at its top, and when their are old, they slow down and stop reproducing.

A species can be of one of the following diet :  vegetarian, carnivore, scavenger and viviparous.

The color of each diet

The diet impact directly on the creature’s colors, as shown above, and on what kind of food they will look for.

The Flowers

Most of the action in the game are ruled by a resource called flowers. They spawn randomly at regular intervals in the space, but each new spawn of a creature has a chance to spawn a new one.
This resource can be gathered by the player by simply clicking on it, this is its first of his possible actions on the ecosystem.

Different types of flowers, the type impact on their value

Those flowers will then be spent to use other ability such as…

The Species creator

The main mechanic of the game is the species creator tool ! This tool allows the player to define and create new species. He can define its diet (Carnivore, vegetarian, viviparous or scavenger) which changes what the species will eat, its size (Small, medium, big) defining its speed , and its behaviour, impacting on its overall life objectives (Ex : Harvesting behaviour makes the creatures harvest flowers).

The Plants

In exchange for a low cost of flowers, the player can place a plant in the ecosystem.
It’s those plants that the vegetarian creatures will feast on, so if you want to have some vegetarian at some point, you’re going to need some plants.
The plants self reproduce at a low rate, if they are not eaten before doing so.

Whistle

The whistle is the last player mechanic, when activated, it creates a small area of influence around the player’s mouse, in which the creatures follow the cursor.
It can be used to regroup some creatures in one place or even force some species to go in their predator jaws. However, this tool isn’t perfect and the player can’t choose which creature he wants to follow, every creature in the area will come.

The whistle in action

My roles

On this project I’ve been working as game designer and as a game developer.