ExSpore

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  ExSpore

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  Main Menu

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  Game Play

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  The graphics we started with

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  The graphics we ended up with

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  Botanical notebook for shrooms, flowers, and trees

Inspiration

Growth. Limitless. What comes to mind? For us - it was community. Communities always start small, but always retain the potential to grow. We wanted to gamify this process of building a diverse community of various individuals and what better way to simulate this than with mushrooms - notorious for rapid and limitless growth.

What it does

Ex-spore is a 2D clicker game that allows a user to build up a network of diverse mushrooms of different shapes, colours, and sizes. The aim of the game is build up your network as much as you can by pressing u to upgrade once you have enough spores (mushroom points equivalent). It draws from graph-theoretic themes, such as 6 degrees of separation to show that all it takes is as little as a few connections per mushroom to build up a whole colony. As with most clicker games, the game features the ability to unlock automatic clicking, and has changing incentives for the user the more their network grows. It also has a botanical notebook that displays a collection of all the different shrooms, flowers, and trees you have managed to include and grow as part of your community.

How we built it

We built the game entirely in Godot, using variations of gd scripts and scenes. All graphics were hand drawn with Resprite and were imported into the game as assets. GitHub was used for central file management and version control.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into various challenges while trying to build up the game. The graphics would suffer from behaving in unexpected ways. For example, when trying to add connections between different mushrooms. Networks can get increasingly complex and ensuring that two mushrooms that were connected remain visible as being connected and don't get shoved off screen when it becomes too populated with mushrooms was difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how all the graphics have come together to create a functional game and the underlying message.

We're also really proud of managing to solve the several syntactical issues we encountered with Godot (which were many).

We also did a lot of pair programming, which exhibited very good levels of teamwork.

What we learned

We all learnt a lot about mushroom variants and the fungal growth cycle.

On a technical level, for some of our team members, they had never used Godot before and so they learnt an entirely new programming language from scratch after pair-programming. Other members of the team learnt how to take advantage of using pixel art and how to draw mushrooms.

What's next for ExSpore

There were several featuers we initially intended to implement and didn't get a chance to including the following:

• having the ability for a user to be able to customise their mushroom
• having several backgrounds representing different mushroom communities and allowing interconnections between different already established communities
• having an overground feature where the graphics could be built even more with villages and cottages
• more dynamics graphic assets e.g. the more mushrooms you get, the more biodiversity you see in the background e.g. more flowers and fauna
• more variations in mushrooms
• and more!

These are all things we plan to continue implementing in future

Built With

• gdscript
• godot