Phylogenesia Automatorum is out!! A roguelite / incremental / life simulation hybrid
Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on my entry for the New Years Incremental Game Jam 2024, and I finally submitted it late last night.
It's a silly little game where you tend to your garden of digital plants, hoping to generate enough Life and Death points when they spawn/die respectively, in order to buy more plants, mutate their characteristics, and expand the field in which they live.
Mutations and field properties will directly (and indirectly) change the plants' behavior on both a local and global level, with some very interesting and unexpected results. Numbers going up isn't always better either too, as, if you upgrade their stats too much, you might make a superplant that chokes the life out of the rest of your simulation and other plants!!
(Oh, and my friend did the music for this game, and it's awesome - each plant as their own instrument/track and they layer on top of each other as you buy more!)
It's a roguelite in the sense that each run you will be choosing between random upgrades, plants, and field tiles with various effects between simulation runs in order to try and maximize your point gains and stay ahead of the reset cost. It's not totally balanced (as it was whipped up in 2 weeks), but with a bit of knowledge and juuuust a hint of luck, you can make almost any run pop off! The goal is to buy all 10 plants and have them all produce points within a single run (representing a diverse garden or something, rather than a monocrop).
As I mentioned previously, it's based heavily on Conway's Game of Life, as I am a huge sucker for incrementals with hypnotizing visuals that change and evolve as you interact with the various systems at play. I took this idea, added a bunch of plants that are variations on the standard ruleset, and went from there.
You might also notice that I used some assets from Stellar Terminus, namely, the 3 sound effects, fonts, color palette, and, retro computer theming. I swear I can do other styles, just, er, not in 2 weeks when I already had quite an ambitious idea!
Over the coming days I'll post some more about the development of it, how I implemented certain systems, and a post mortem. You can probably imagine how datastructures-heavy this game was. In the end I had 1 object that ran the entire simulation, 1 that displayed the breakdown of how each plant was doing, and like 20+ objects for UI...
For now though? I'd love for you to try it out, play a few runs, and hear your thoughts on it!!
