Rooting Home

Game Developer

Rooting Home is a short adventure game developed in 48 for the Global Game Jam 2023.

Our space adventurer has crash-landed on a strange planet filled with peculiar vegetation. With his spaceship damaged, he must gather fuel to escape, but first, he must explore this unfamiliar world and discover the secrets hidden within its plant life to overcome the challenges that await him.

Genre: Adventure, Exploration

Platform: PC

Developed for: GGJ 2023

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Rooting Home is a first-person exploration game that plunges players into the role of a space traveller who crash-lands on an uncharted planet filled with peculiar flora and fauna.

In this game, players utilize a unique hook plant tool to collect and manipulate strange seeds found throughout the environment. These seeds are key to interacting with the alien world, solving puzzles, and ultimately finding a way to escape the planet.

As players explore, they will encounter mysterious structures etched with inscriptions that reveal the hidden powers of the planet’s seeds and fauna. These discoveries will be crucial in guiding players on leveraging the seeds' abilities to overcome challenges and escape this enigmatic world.

GAME REFENCES

Slime Rancher: Slime Rancher served as the primary inspiration for Rooting Home. We drew from its mechanic of combining slimes to create various types with unique behaviours, which directly influenced our seed combination mechanic. In Rooting Home, players can combine different seeds to unlock new abilities and interactions within the game world, adding layers of strategy and discovery similar to the playful experimentation found in Slime Rancher.

GAME JAM THEME

For the Global Game Jam 2023, the theme was "Roots". Our team decided to interpret the theme as the maturation process of trees. Were integrated this idea by creating a game where the main mechanic is based on seeds and trees.

The game consists of a space traveller who must harvest magical seeds with different effects to finally get the key seed that will allow him to escape the planet. Through harvesting and exploration, the player will find that many seeds are useful to survive and improve his crops.