Polish is Not a 4-letter Word

When we started working on Plant Therapy at the end of 2021, we weren't sure how big of a game it was going to be or how long we were going to work on it. 

I had a game design document and a vague idea of collecting plants and that was it when we started. Our main purpose was to use this little game as proof of concept project to see if we enjoyed working together. 

Fast forward 20 months and we are, indeed, still happy to be working together and coming up with lots of new ideas for Plant Therapy. But besides coming up with new ideas, I finally have time to go back and look at some of the old ideas and I see a lot of room for improvement/polish.

Some plants and pots and art work are not up to our current standard. Some items I meant to make as a test and they ended up in the game as it is now. Others were experiments that should have been tossed a while ago.  So I am taking some time out from working on new items and really honing in on what could look better, starting with the plants.

Take this Schefflera, also known as an umbrella plant. Turns out we were spelling it incorrectly this whole time. Oops!

While I like the illustrative style of the Schefflera Plant I originally drew, my style has grown more lush and leaning a hair more realistic in the last year. Also, the original plant only had 2 layers. We are rigging the plants and animating them in Unity. Once we got comfortable animating the plants I started adding far more layers.

 OLD:

The new Schefflera has 6 layers. Some are technically on the same branches so it gives a lot more flexibility and expression when it comes to animating.

NEW:

Refinement is really what can make a game special, and we plan to keep adding more polish in the upcoming months.

Look out for the new Schefflera on our new Windows, MAC, and web builds!

XOXO//Jennevieve