The main enemy of this game is pollution from a nearby factory. Our original design included a Plants vs. Zombies - esque mechanic where you and an enemy AI interact with a common board.

 For this system, I created a pseudo-AI brain that controls the corruption spread. The corruption guarantees a spawn on the far side of the map, away from the player. Every tick of our internal timer in-game, the corruption looks for one random nearby un-corrupted block. If the block is already corrupted, we add to it's internal corruption value and add some more VFX to show it's closer to being polluted. If the tile isn't corrupted at all, We spawn the initial pollution VFX and add it to a list of tiles to corrupt over time. When those corrupted tiles become fully polluted, They will also spread corruption, slowly making their way to the player's side.

This was one of my favorite systems I've worked on in recent memory! It was fun to build the system quickly from start to finish, and be able to add visual polish and distinction in such a short time.

For this game, we realized over the short development cycle that we needed an onboarding section for players to familiarize themselves with the game's systems and keybinds.

I created a guided tutorial sequence that locks players behind certain actions (i.e. planting a tree, blessing a tile, etc.). The screenshot featured here shows what the developer side looks like.

Designers / users of the back end system simply add an entry to the tutorial index, add which tutorial character sprite they want to display, whether or not this advances to the next stage of the tutorial, and lastly whether or not an event should coincide with the dialogue completion.