jv/little-seeds | portfolio

Little Seeds

Game / Level Design

2017

Left 4 Dead

A relaxing VR experience

Little Seeds is a relaxing sandbox experience in Virtual Reality developped on UE4 that takes place in a japanese-inspired garden in which the player can grow trees in front of his eyes. It's playable only with a HTC Vive.

Our goal was to provide an experience that relaxes people and also amazes them. We wanted the player to do whatever she wants and we wanted the experience to be usable by people of all ages. That's why Little Seeds is playable using only the trigger of the controllers.

TEASER

WALKTHROUGH

Gameplay

As it is a sandbox experience, the player can do whatever she wants, so there are few elements of gameplay at the disposal of the player.

The core of the experience is to take a seed and sow it in a pot full of soil, pour some water on it with the watering can and watch the tiny tree growing in front of the eyes of the player.

The player can plant her tree in the garden where it will grow again to become a normal sized tree.

Before planting her tree, she can cut branches with a secateur in the workshop.

She can also stock her tiny trees on the shelves instead of planting them.

The player can also turn on a radio with 3 stations available that give a different mood for the ambiance of the game, like a funky music for exemple.

SOW A SEED

Alchemy

As one goal of the experience is to amaze the player and encourage her to experiment, we created an alchemy system that permits to combine 2 seeds and obtain an original tree inspired by those seeds.

The alchemy has an effect on the shape of the tree, the shape and color of the leaves, and the color of the trunk and branches.

For each combination, 5 models of shape of trees are possible, each of these models has more than 50 000 possible outcomes (from the procédural generation system for any tree), 2 models of 2nd generation leaves and 2 model of trunk and branches color. On the image you can see the 5 kind of trees for each combination with seeds 0 to 5.

A combination of 3 seeds is possible too in the editor but we didn't have the time to implement it in the final build. The concept is to have stranger trees when combining more and more seeds.