Garden Sneak Peek – Skins ‘n’ Sprites

People are particular. We like our coffee a certain way. And really, our particular personalities are the sum of these one-cream-two-sugars-and-only-decaf-after-lunch preferences. Me? I’m a Dapper Dan man.

We’re developing The Garden with everybody and nobody in particular in mind. We want worker/players to feel as though their garden is unique to them, so we’re imbuing The Garden with opportunities for personalization all over the dang place.

Of course, organizations customize The Garden with their unique sales or training or retention objectives. And managers customize The Garden by aligning game performance with individual job performance. But when it comes down to it, The Garden lets worker/players personalize their gameplay experience.

With the help of some amazing designers (including friendlies Emily Lonigro, Terri Falvey and Patrick Olds), we’re assembling a library of skins and sprites that allow folks to design a personal organic space. These aesthetic assets work on a macro and micro level:

Skins define the overall theme for The Garden. A skin might be a desert themed garden, for instance, or a cell-shaded or origami one. Heck, it might not be a garden at all. Depending upon the deployment, the skin might be chosen by your organization (in corporate colors, perhaps), or by the individual player.

Sprites define the style and behavior of individual plants and critters within the garden. As the game progresses, worker/players are given the opportunity to plant increasingly unique and exotic plants, and interact with increasingly curious critters. Some interactions and rewards require the combination of specific sprites, too, so exploration is continually encouraged.

Skins and sprites are designed atop a standard working logic, so styles are infinitely interchangeable. This allows us to continually grow the library of assets and keep the game interesting for the green-thumbed worker/player.

Which begs the question: what sort of interesting things would you grow?

One Comment

1. You Don’t Need Virtual Worlds When You Can Game Reality // Nathan Verrill says:

   March 25, 2010 at 6:28 am

   [...] Despite the incredibly non-fun, non-game corporate gobbledy gook description, the interface isn’t bad, and has shades of our Garden project. [...]