Flowering Plants Of The Outer Worlds

Flowering Plants Of The Outer Worlds is my entry for the 2024 SA Game Jam (72 hours). The theme was "Midnight Staircase", which is a type of mechanic.

You're part adventurer, part courier on standby for the Extrasolar Botany Association, which has contracted you to acquire specimens for its research and collections. The association will pay you for a successful retrieval. Sometimes this will be easy. Sometimes this will not.

Consult The Flowering Plants Of The Outer Worlds plant encyclopaedia to plan your missions. Manage your round-trip fuel and oxygen supplies to ensure that you make it back in one piece and with the specimens intact. Use your income to upgrade your ship so that you can attempt more daring missions but be careful: the cosmos is vast. It's filled with unexpected anomalies and dangers that may catch you by surprise.

Asset Disclosure: I reused the basic Twine template/style sheet from Vignettes because when I started I couldn't remember how to use Twine since it's been a few years. The basic plant description text is also adapted from something I had already written.

 

Credits:

• Mandy J Watson (@mandyjwatson on Bluesky and Twitter):
  Game design, narrative and writing, programming, and art
• Fonts:
  GlassTTY VT220 by Viacheslav Slavinsky (Public Domain/Unlicence);
  Munro by Ten By Twenty (SIL Open Font Licence 1.1);
  Nevis by Ten By Twenty (SIL Open Font Licence 1.1); and
  Pixel Operator by Jayvee Enaguas/HarvettFox96 (Creative Commons Zero (CC0) 1.0 Universal)

 

Software And Tools Used:

• Base64.Guru, ColorHexa, GIMP, Notepad, Twine.

 

Submission Notes: I ran out of time so many of the plants and lots of randomness and random event information is missing from the game. There is, however, one accessible win path and one accessible lose path so it's possible to complete the game.