HI EVERYONE AND WELCOME TO ANOTHER DAND
*clears throat*
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog.
Earlier this month we previewed some exciting new assets related to food and culinary furniture. Today we have some more visual treats to show off in the form of new foragables. As you may have heard, this includes the titular dandelions of Dandelion Void!
But before we get into that, we’d like to call attention to a new video from our good friend MrAtomicDuck. Earlier this month he recorded an interview with Dandelion Void game director Brian Ostrander – you can find that below!
When the video went live, Duck asked if we could monitor the comments for any questions or comments. One stood out to us in particular:
@user-ne9sd4ow1o, this devlog is dedicated to you.
Roadside flowers of Interstellar Space
Dandelion Void obviously has a heavy plant theme, and so we’ve always liked the idea of there being a wide variety of wild foods to find and prepare. But up to now, the game’s sole foraging offerings have been the tough, starchy ponic tubers that love to give our testers indigestion.
This past month, as part of our food-focused development push, Manzanita Interactive’s Dara Insixiengmay created a handful of new flowers and mushrooms for the player to pick!
Flowers:
Very few of the plants that make up Dandelion Void’s high-tech jungle were planted where they are intentionally, so it’s only appropriate that the game’s first 3 pickable flowers are all known for their fecundity and propensity to spread.
Mustard
A common sight in the parks, roadsides, and hiking trails around our team’s home in Los Angeles is wild mustard. Mustard plants have small yellow flowers and thin, branching stems that can grow several feet high. They are notorious as an invasive species and a big threat to our native flora. In recent years, some reports have even confirmed of a new mustard population beyond the solar system:
California Poppies
The California Poppy is the official flower of our beloved golden state. With bright orange petals and beachy blue-green foliage, it’s quite a looker! You can see plenty of these growing around SoCal in gardens, road margins, and natural spaces, but the best known poppy hotspot is Antelope valley. In certain years with ideal growing conditions we get a phenomenon known as a “superbloom,” which paints the entire landscape golden orange.
With such a special significance to this flower, we couldn’t help but put it in the game!
Dandelions
This is it. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. Dandelions in Dandelion Void!
Dandelion’s have a “cosmopolitan” distribution, meaning no matter where you’re reading this article, you’re probably not far from a dandelion.
The yellow head of this successful plant is actually not a single flower, but a compound of individual “florets.” A few weeks after blooming, each floret develops into an individual seed with a feathery “parachute” that aids in wind dispersal; together they create a charismatic white ball known as the “seed head.”
With sufficient force, the wind can dislodge seeds from the stem, carrying them to new potential growing locations. Out of hundreds of dispersed seeds, though, only a few (or even none!) will actually land on a viable new home. The wind takes the “bad luck” seeds to resource-poor locations with no hope of accessing fertile ground, where they ultimately wither and perish.
The propensity of dandelions to grow where nobody allowed them to, as well as the harsh fate of these “bad luck” seeds, were both metaphors we wanted to tap into when we chose the name Dandelion Void.
As a quick aside, the original logo for our game featured a literal dandelion seed! There were a number of logistical issues with this logo – it’s too detailed to reproduce at small scales, the aspect ratio is problematic, and the text treatment isn’t doing much – but it was a pretty fun idea.
The original logo for Dandelion Void
Mushrooms:
In addition to these new flowers, Dara also created a few mushrooms. We’ll talk more about individual mushroom species in a future devlog. In the meantime: if you’re reading this, Dara, I’ve made a weird finding. I picked these two similar-looking mushrooms, and the game identifies both as “apple boletes.” They have a similar shape, but the coloration is different?
I suppose I’ll just have to try eating both and see what happens…
Foraging Fun
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s journey through plant taxonomy! I’ll emphasize that while we’ve started making good progress on the art side of this feature, there’s still plenty of game design to be done. What different uses can you put these plants to? How do they grow? And what’s the deal with those weird mushrooms? We look forward to answering these questions and more as we nurture this feature from a tiny little seedling into a fruit-bearing garden.
Until then, everybody please take care and have a great week!
- Robin and the Manzanita Interactive team