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J. Cody Winchester
Game Designer
Treevolution
Platform
PC
Tools
Unity
Duration
~4 months
Team
Charles Stone - Designer
Christopher McCooey - Programmer
Krisitin Darling - Artist
Role
Game Designer
Overview
Treevolution is a turn-based strategy game where you face off against a human or AI player by growing trees and competing for dominace over the map.
Gathering energy from your trees the player may plant additional trees and expand their forest across four unique terrains as well as interact with the wildlife that springs forth. Expanding onto any one of these four unique biomes will cause your trees to undergo a rapid evolutionary process that adds new strategic mechanics to your forest, such as healing properties or a poisonous sludge that harms enemy trees.
Intent Statement
Our team created Treevolution with the vision of encapsulating the experience of evolution in a strategic environment. We went through many different iterations to get the prototype to where it is, exploring ecosystem cycles, how certain trees have adapted to specific climates and ecological succession (the observed process of change in what species are present in an ecological community.)
Gameplay
Both players begin with two trees, from which they gain energy that they can spend to plant new trees to an adjacent tile from an adult tree. As players expand their trees new strategic venues become available as new terrains are discovered.
All trees have a certain amount of health points as well as amounts of damage that they can inflict upon opponents trees. Trees will automatically take and deal out damage to adjacent opponent's trees between turns
Health
Damage
Damage
Health
Damage
Health
Evolution
Growing a tree onto a new terrain type will cause a mutation to occur in the child tree. After five turns the newly mutated tree will spread their terrain to all of the adjacent tiles.
We tied this spreading of the terrain to the games end-state. This was laregly choosen as a substitute for the previous victory condition of purely combative dominance over the entire map.
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2
Spreading the Ice Terrain
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2
Conceptualization
A large part of my contribution to this game was the research and implementation of ecological systems into the game. There are two aspects of affecting ecosystem that made it into the final prototype; the deaver and bee fairy.
We went through a lot of different phases of our game, experiementing with different aspects of evolution and adaption. Finding the right game composition with the right elements of evolution and adaptation was a fun and very experiemental process.
Iterative Process
 Prototype Version 1 |
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 Prototype Version 2 |
 Prototype Version 3 |
 Treevolution |
Deaver
Bee
Fairy
Documentation
Researching ecosystem cycles, I created a document to help create our very own complete ecosystem cycle for our game. I started with the cycle of energy in a typical forest ecosystem and then started to block out certain input and output variables, such as Oxygen being produced from a tree. By bluring the technical aspects of the cycle I was able to create a dynamic system that could theoritically work in any given ecosystem, no matter how other-worldly it is.
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 1 |
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 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 2 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 3 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 4 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 5 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 6 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 7 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 8 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 9 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 10 |
 Energy Cycle Flow Chart Iteration 11 |
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 iterative process - tundra concept.png |
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 iterative process - tundra prototype.png |
 iterative process - tropics concept.png |
 iterative process - tropics prototype.png |
 iterative process - desert concept.png |
 iterative process - desert prototype.png |
Along with researching and exploring ecological paths we also toyed around with having changing climates in throughout the game, to which there would be specific genes better suited for certain climates. This is what eventually led to the terrain system that we finally settled on.
Post Mortem
This project was incredibly fun to work on, especially with how loose we stayed throughout its delvopment on how exactly to express evolution and how it tied into the intented experience. It was very much a giant experiement, a phase that we got a little obsessed with but helped to push our creativity and really focus on the player experience. We weren't really able to figure out what exactly we wanted out of the game, however what we had as an end result has some hybrid between a turn-based strategy game and an ecological succession simulator. I'm glad that we ended up keeping the project so experiemental, it expanded my mind and had me researching a great many things that I would not have known about otherwise.
Gameplay Video
Here's a trailer video that I made for my team after our final update to the game.
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