A Branching Story

So where does this story begin? Now? A few years ago? When I was born? The dawn of time? I’m not going to debate the concept of free will and predestination here (save that for a later blogpost). To make a long story short, let’s just say that I’ve wanted to make a game my whole life.

Well, to be honest I already have. I’ve been programming for a while now and depending on your definition of a game, I’ve already made games. I programmed Tetris on my TI-84 graphing calculator. I programmed a game on Scratch where you play as Pikachu dodging falling pokeballs. I made a prototype of a game for Ludum Dare 41 (The theme was “Combine 2 Incompatible Genres” and I chose Cooking Simulator and Rhythm and named it “Cooking Mamba”). And most recently I join the “20 second game jam” in which I made a fully playable game: WHITE 20NE. I’ve also made a number of game prototypes while I was in college, most of which have been lost.

So in a sense I’ve already reached my goal, but in another sense I’m nowhere near my goal. I think the question I need to be able to answer now is: “Can I make a living doing this?” Thus, my story begins here to see if I have what it takes to make a game, publish it, and make money. Based on my results, it will determine whether I can do this full-time, as a hobby, or maybe I’ll decide that this isn’t worth the time anymore.

Sorry, got a little too introspective there. Let’s talk about something more interesting like what kind of game I should make as my ‘brand’ flagship. I’ve been toying around with ideas for a good while now. Pitching them to my friends for feedback and discussing potential implementations. And I think I have a good candidate: a tree growing metroidvania.

I have posted about this on r/gameideas already. I actually got the idea from a rejected theme from LD 41: “Never Stop Growing.” The premise would be that you are a tree and instead of having a character that you control and walk around a dungeon, you would grow your branches around to interact with the environment. The “backtracking” prominent in most metroidvanias would simply be to start growing at a different part of the tree.

It seemed like a simple idea at first, but apparently trees are harder to grow than I initially thought. I’ve been doing doing some preliminary research on how real trees grow and I’ve also found some promising tree structures to implement in code like Lindenmayer systems:

So my next step will be to make a prototype to get a feel for the scope of the project and branch out from there. (If I do go this route, expect more tree puns.)