Sprocket Garden is a cozy collection game in which you play as a lone robot collecting plants to fill out your garden stand in the overgrown ruins of a futuristic society. The player plays as a recently reawakened robot, seemingly the last one still fully operating in this area. You don’t know much about where you came from or what your role was in your past life, but your processing unit is programmed for one thing: collecting plants for vending! There doesn’t seem to be any actual customers to buy said plants, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is scouring the environment for the best plant species to fill out your budding business!
Sprocket Garden takes place in a small clearing in a lush abandoned city. At the center of the clearing sits the player character’s house and plant stand: a small grove and collection of stands built around a massive robotic head. The environment is full of the ruins of a robot-centric society, with large arms, pistons and mechanical pieces abruptly poking through the tangle of roots and stretching leaves. The clearing is bordered on all sides by a dense jungle of flora, an intimidating barrier that the robot doesn’t dare to brave. Thankfully, there’s more than enough biodiversity spread across the little pocket you inhabit. The springtime sun cascades down through the edges of the treeline, illuminating the vibrant blooming colors of each and every unique species of plant you’ll discover and collect.
The game is cozy in nature and revolves around traversing the clearing and collecting different plants, which upon collecting will automatically populate your plant stand back at home. There will likely be a small number of plants to collect, though this small mechanic would reflect the possibility of a much bigger amount of items to collect in a full sized game. The player experience revolves around traversing a visually appealing and relaxing environment, and collecting plants to fill out their stand as they desire, introducing a subtle amount of customization/soft progression. There won’t be any timers, required number of plants to be collected, or any real challenges; the game is meant to be more of a small, almost meditative interactive experience.
The art style will be based around the cozy and relaxing themes of the game, focusing on lower poly assets and vibrant lush colors/textures. It will have a heavy stylization, with relatively flat colored textures. The lack of detail will create a bit softer vibe to the world. It will take place midday in spring, so the plants are all at their most striking stages of bloom. The clearing will have a large amount of ambient light from the sun, but the large plants on the borders will create pockets of shadow to contrast the wide open sections.
I love this concept! The whole cozy collection mechanic reminds me of Paradise Marsh, if you’re familiar with that game; it also has a more low-res art style, but not a low-poly one, so I’m excited to see how that will end up looking! For the player character, I’m curious how much of them you’ll be able to see (ie, whether the game is 3rd person or 1st person); the idea sounds too cute not to let the player see.
Definitely 3rd person ! I think I left that out. Probably the typical distance 3rd person as well, though it may be fun to pull the camera back a bit further to see more of the world at once!
I’m so excited to see this game, I live for solar-punk. The quick sketch gets a vivid image across and it gives a good sense of how the world will look. For the plant collection, how do you plan on representing that in the game? Like are you going to be picking flowers, or finding potted plants in the environment, or something else?
I’m honestly between those few ideas for the plants currently! In a perfect, full scoped version, you would be able to interact and “pick” any plant in the environment and a potted version would fill the shop area. In this case though putting the potted plant models in the environment might be easier/more clear for interaction purposes
I also read the assignment wrong and thought the game map was due for this post, whoops
The idea of just collecting plants is really cute. Would there be any other life in the city like animals or insects? Also would you be able to arrange the plants you’ve picked into a bouquet?
I like the idea of innocent, oblivious robots living in a post-apocalyptic world, it reminds me of the start of WALL-E. Is the tone going to be entirely cozy, or will there be aspects of the ruins that hint towards a darker past? Either way could work well, just with a completely different feel.
I love the way the game is broken up into different areas. Will the player be able to plant collect flowers in the game based on their personal preferences and make their own decorative choices?
I really like the concept of your game! It reminds me of Wall-E from , well, Wall-E, with your robot’s obsession with collecting plants. Is the bulk of the game just collecting plants, or will there be ways to nurture your plants as well?