The Holy Treenity

All you need to do is survive for 5 minutes.

Wait, why am I dying? Oh, I don't have enough oxygen. Let's plant some trees then.

Wait, why am I so cold? Oh god, all those trees sucked all the carbon out of the air and made this place cool down! BURN THE TREES. BURN THE TREES.

Is it just me, or has it not rained in like a minute? I need water! I need water to survive!

In "The Holy Treenity", all you need to do is survive the environment. But that's easier said than done.

20 Million Trees

This game is my submission for the 20 Million Trees Game Jam. It was made completely from scratch in two weeks, with the Godot Game Engine. (Which, in hindsight, might not have been the best idea. But it all worked out wonderfully in the end.)

The theme was "create a game with a STORY involving trees". I unfortunately didn't have time for the STORY part in the game, but the tree element is more than present, so I hope that makes up for it.

Source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Pandaqi/The-Holy-Treenity

And if you can, please donate to the 20 Million Trees project! The link is: https://teamtrees.org/

This particular game is of course meant to be some lighthearted fun, but climate is a serious issue and I am more than happy to help raise some awareness. (Climate is also a complex issue. The systems in the game are therefore heavily simplified or simply inaccurate, so don't use this game as a credible source for your climate change information :p)

What do I do in this game?

In this game, you need to survive until the end of the stage. As you play, there's the "holy trinity" of the environment to keep in check:

• Heat: temperatures that are too low or too high will kill your player. Not to mention that high temperatures cause forest fires, and low temperatures freeze all the water.
• Water: trees need water to grow, and players need water to survive.
• Oxygen/Carbondioxide: players need oxygen to breathe, which trees can produce ... but they need carbondioxide in order to do so.

But the environment interactions go much further than this. A higher average temperature means more rain can be stored in the clouds, which means it takes longer before it starts to rain. Trees drop seeds/saplings from time to time, which are essential for replanting trees during the level. (I made a diagram while developing the game, which I'll post in a devlog.)

As you play, "enemies" will also try to tear down the environment and kill you in the process. You need to stop them.

Features

This game is for 1-4 players. With more than a single player, it becomes a co-op: you need to help each other keep the environment stable.

It supports both controllers and keyboards.

There are 5 different "weapons" to use (a gun that shoots trees, another that spits water droplets, etc.) When you pick up a new weapon, you throw out the old one. This has two implications: you need to be careful with where you "leave" weapons, and if you're playing multiplayer, multiple players can never use the same weapon.

There are 5 stages of increasing difficulty. Each stage introduces a fun new gimmick that adds to the challenge.

There's a small tutorial that explains the buttons, and an interactive tutorial in the first level that explains the core mechanics. All the environment interactions, and how you can use those to your advantage, should be figured out by you! (Also because they would be way too complex and interconnected to explain in the game. Everything influences everything.)

Anything else?

Because the game was quickly created for a jam, there will certainly be bugs, or areas that could look/feel nicer, etc. Please let me know if there's anything to improve.

This is a list of things I wanted to do/look at (but haven't had the time to do so):

• Most importantly: this type of game would need a LOT more playtesting for balancing. There's many, many parameters that go into the simulation (or even something like player movement), and now they're just tuned to whatever I feel will be challenging for the average player, but that's not a very reliable way of balancing a game.

• I only decided to make logs function as "blocking tiles" very late in the development. (This simply means that, when you shoot logs, they are seen as part of the level. Water will flow over it, instead of through it. Players also cannot go through them.) However, because logs can be any size and any rotation, this often looks odd. So I might rewrite that to "snap" logs to the closest horizontal/vertical alignment.
• Create enemies that actually fire things at you, which would create some more action AND require you to move quickly (and perhaps use logs as shields).
  • I was thinking about enemies that walk around the level and chop trees or eat seeds when they find them. Or an enemy that shoots firebolts, like the fire weapon the player has, and the only way to defeat it is by drowning it in water. Something along those lines.
• More variety/details in the level tiles. (Now it's just grass, mud, or a combination of those. I could at least add the standard things: sand tiles, slopes, etc.)
• Improve the weapon switching mechanic: it works fine right now, I just feel it could be better.
• Configurable controls and proper menus. The main menu and game over menu are fine, but there is no in-level pause screen. When you press ESC, you're just immediately taken back to the main menu (without asking for confirmation)
• Somewhere along the line I lost my ice sound effect + ice sliding animation ... don't know why it doesn't work anymore.

Still, I've been able to test the game with other players, and it's never crashed for me and has always been enjoyable, so I don't think there should be too many hiccups.

You're also free to use any footage, code or assets or from the game in any way you want.

If you want to know how I made something or how I designed the game, please let me know, as I'm thinking about writing a handful of articles about the creation of this game.

Have fun!