PLANTASIA is a cozy, semi-idle, farming game where you restore

life to a barren planet from the safety of your orbital greenhouse.

With Solarpunk at the helm of Plantasia’s visual identity, the hard surface design and technology were an important early pillar to establish. With Mesoamerican influence, we could more easily distinguish ourselves from other solarpunk projects. But, we did still want to lean on those classic lush spaces, especially in the Greenhouse. The ship may be a controlled research space but it needed to feel properly lived in and loved.

Technology VisDev

The Seed Bank was one of the more important props. From both gameplay and narrative sides, it is a key object within the world and essentially the core of your greenhouse operation. The Seed Bank became an early hero asset to try to match on future designs pulling inspiration from both the Aztec Calendar as well as some strange seed pods. Below, you can see the development of the Seed Bank in-game room. Due to Plantasia’s 1/3 screen size, compositions had to be pushed in unusual ways.

Of course, at the helm of Plantasia’s gameplay are Plants! We knew we wanted a breeding system that could handle color variants and hybrids of various plant families and species with distinct visual features. After various trial and error, the final system separates plants into “Base” and “Bloom” denoting their plant family and species, respectively. With four different family base types and twelve different species blooms, we wound up with a 48 total unique plant appearances. Combine that with four growth stages per and nine possible color variants and we wound up with over 1700 different plant sprites in game!

We initially threw around the idea of letting the engine handle all color swapping as it was already randomly rolling this attribute with every new hybrid. But, the art team decided we wanted more control over the painting and visual appeal of each palette. In the end, all plant sprites were manually recolored and touched up for final looks.

Flora + Hybrids VisDev

Character Sprites

plantasia_port_bear.png
plantasia_port_chimalli.png
plantasia_port_mackenna.png
plantasia_port_mwinyi.png
plantasia_port_tupane.png

Because of the wide range of plants you can breed, we needed graphics that were distinguishable at a glance in the codex. I developed plant type crests and specific seed icons for various species present in the UI. With the addition of an affix system that motivated hybridization, each effect needed an obvious icon in menus.

Elements like the Faction Icons were useful in certain menus, but ultimately let me explore the larger world and visual language beyond your greenhouse operations.

Iconography + Graphic VisDev

Plant Family Crests

Faction Icons

STYLE GUIDE

As one of the original team members, building the style guide was one of my first responsibilities. We had a rough idea of what we wanted for the world but the narrative designer and I had a lot of freedom in determining much of the cultural influences. Some ideas presented here were not explored in the final game, but having those decisions made informed everything else.

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Additional Misc. Work

Station Door Transition Screen (Unused)

Album Art (Music by Andrew Burns!)

Original Key Art

Final Launch Key Art

The original key art very much grew from an early blue sky piece where I was finding my footing with the world. With the final Key Art though, we had to a chance to convey the narrative tone and relaxed gameplay vibe.

Progression

Early Blue Sky Work