Astrobotany

Astrobotany is an atmospheric space theme with colourful characters and relaxing rhythmic animation and gameplay, made for the 10:10 WIG Game Jam.

We were challenged to create some form of game or interactive experience that focuses on a Female or LGBTQIA+ Protagonist. It was important to our team that we focused on a female protagonist whose story didn’t revolve around being a woman or stigmatisation from being LGBTQIA+. The women on our team have to deal with that enough in real life! We wanted an awesome lesbian who was overcoming something with huge stakes. We cracked open a Miro board and brainstormed and came up with Ellis, a female botanist carrying the plant on her spaceship to nurture and grow to help the human race survive on a new planet called Earth 2. Pretty big stakes! Also we stan a gay woman in STEM. We wanted Ellis to be an older woman too as with a lot of games and other media women are usually side-lined when over a certain age, but Ellis has the skills and knowledge to help our species survive!

Our first hurdle was how we could make this a fun game to play in the time that we had. What would be the mechanic to grow and nurture the plant? We brainstormed and took inspiration from rhythm games.

Our other hurdle was that we lost a team member after the first day as they were ill. So we had to rescope and re-prioritise the tasks over the weekend which turned out well in the end.

There were also some last-minute issues with our MP4 intro and outro videos in the web GL build. After a lot of googling and learning, we should be streaming them instead of embedding them.
Overall, our team did great. We would have loved to have added more features such as some kind of process bar to show time until the next level but things like this were left out due to the short time limit. It was important we managed to get a full short game up on Itch and we think we managed that! 

If you’re curious about the team who brought you Astrobotany…

Adam is an UK based artist who coded and built the game as a solo job! You can find his website here: https://ajbattle.wordpress.com/

Kit is also an UK based artist, who designed the character, backgrounds, and whipped up the animations over the weekend. You can find her primarily on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kibblemeat 

Kerrie is our amazing project manager who brought the team together and kept us from running around with ideas too big to handle! On top of that, she brought together our audio to really bring the game to life – you can find her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hikerrie/