✎ tale_of_the_plant_dungeon [the libarynth]

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The part of the groWorld game where an individual player plays with their own plant, could be a sort of 2D (or pseudo-2D) side scrolling dungeon crawling game.

Examples:

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These sorts of games can also look very nice when rendered in 3D:

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But instead of making your way through an existing maze by overcoming obstacles, you would create the maze yourself.

The idea is that you are inside of the plant. You start inside of a seed. And when you carve tunnels down, you're actually creating roots. When you're carving upwards, your creating stems and branches. On this level of the game, you cannot see the world around you. You can only see the inside of the plant. As you dig/carve deeper/further, you discover resources in the floor/air. These can help you develop flowers and leaves, e.g. Perhaps you find dynamite and the explosion blows you a flower?

To add to the being-a-plant feeling, you would not control a single avatar but there would be a bunch of "minions" at your disposal. You order them where to work and they do the work for you. You start of with a small number of minions, but you can create more as you continue to play (possibly with resources that you find). If you are not paying attention to the game, the minions keep working, but not as diligently as when you are looking. When you stay away too long they get lazy. Perhaps they ultimately die.
To strengthen the bond between the player and these minions, perhaps we could say that they will only be happy when they work. Perhaps the need to carve for nourishment. And they only work when you tell them to.

The entire garden could exist in a pseudo-parallax pseudo-2D landscape where travel with only panning and no rotation. This offers you the ability to select a plant and zoom in on it. When you do, you get a 2D view of the "inside" of the plant, where the minions are hard (or not so hard...) at work. If this is your plant, you can help the minions and grow the plant.

I like the idea of being inside of a plant and being unaware of the outside world except for the things that you "touch".
I also find the idea of carving a plant out of the air very poetic. As if the plant has always been there.
Controlling the minions seems like a good way of dealing with a less individualistic mindset. And perhaps the minions resemble the cells that make real-world plants grow.

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