Space Garden: Prototype v. 0.1!

After a long and trecherous journey, finally I have produced Space Garden 0.1!  But how did I get here?

It all started when I was working on building a light weight Force Directed Graph system in javascript for a non-gaming project.  For those that don't know, FDG is a system for displaying chunks of information in a dynamic way, highlighting how these chunks are related to each other.  When building the system I added some exagerated physics to make it even more dynamic, and it was just so much fun to fiddle with I thought to myself "there has to be a game here!"

I looked at the crazy, complicated conglomerates I built using different shapes and colours, exagerated the physics even more, and thought it looked like a crazy complicated life form and I thought it would be fun to somehow cultivate a plant or a garden floating in the unknown and intangible ether of... outer space?  Why not!  And thus the concept for "space garden" was born!

So, on top of my FDG display framework and exaggerated physics engine I added a few more physics variables, added a Power Management system to allow nodes to power each other, added a Fruiting system so that nodes could grow from each other and a few other experimental systems.  It was really cool to connect the nodes and watch everything grow, but there wasn't much to do except add nodes, fiddle with plant and watch it pulse and grow.  It wasn't yet a game, it was more of a 'simulator' at this point...

So I put it down for a while and moved on to other projects - especially my day job - and eventually forgot all about it.

Then a couple of weeks ago i was exploring my github repo and came across this project again.  I played it for a bit and thought "y'know, this is actually kinda fun!  There's definitely a game here... somewhere..."

So, I used my knowledge and love of idle games to add some simple objectives / upgrades, a prestige system, a skill system and a few more quirks and limitations... and here we are!

Please have a look and play the game, but keep in mind it's still a raw prototype!  There are lots of improvements to be made, but I think this "proof of concept" implementation is a good showcase of where things can go from here!