Bausonglade - a gardening game
Co-created with : Alexander king
Role : Game Design, Game Art and Animation
Bausonglade is a single player simulation game in which you tend a garden of procedurally generated plants on the back of a giant badger that slowly move around the world. In this game, the player, the plants, and the badger together form a symbiotic system and that lives or dies together.
In the development process, I focused on the system and visual design.
Game Design
The gif on the left is an early prototype I made to demonstrate the visual style we wanted, using 2D sprites to create a 3D environment, supported by a perspective camera. The one on the right is our final prototype that shows how a player interacts with the game world.
I also made some design documents to organize our thoughts and to make sure we were on the same page. Below is one of them, made at the early stage before the game had a name:
Visual Design
The art style of this project was developed in tandem with the system design. I was experimenting with using hand-drawn textures in a video game and it turned out to be soft and warm. When designing the player avatar, I started with sketches on pen and paper:
We picked three of them and I made some test idle animations of them:
We decided to use the unhappy ghost after polling our fellow game designers and social media followers. In later designs, we shaped the player interaction around our ghost and I started picturing it moving around in the game world:
