Growing Wild 🪴 Wishlist on Steam

This also looks super cute <3 Love bringing back nature >:D

Grow! Defend! Restore!

We are currently working on Growing Wild - a cozy third person tower defense game.

Steam Page: store.steampowered.com/app/3123650/...

Our game Growing Wild is featured in the "Games forged in Germany" Steam showcase! 🌻

If you like tower defenses with plants and bringing nature back to the world, be sure to check out our game 🌱

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If you want to chat with the devs or others who like Growing Wild, join the Discord: discord.gg/T4qFmbeYXu

Growing Wild on Steam Enjoy the cozy vibes of this vibrant tower defense game. Harness the power of magical plants to restore nature's balance and uncover the secrets buried beneath the corruption. Grow, Defend, Restore!

Be sure to check out our Steam Page for additional info (and possibly to wishlist 🌱)

store.steampowered.com/app/3123650/...

Growing Wild – Announcement Trailer YouTube video by NeoBird Official

Have you seen the Growing Wild Announcement Trailer?
youtu.be/aZaElIanEZw

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And if you don't know him! This is the renewshroom from our Plant Tower Defense Game Growing Wild! If you like the style or concept, feel free to follow us and/or wishlist!

store.steampowered.com/app/3123650/Growing_Wild/

concept art of magical blue mushroom that emits blue powder

Remember this guy? Well this is what the renewshroom looked like when he was still little, just a little concept drawing <3
They grow up so fast, spreading nature everywhere 💚

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Some concept art for the different areas 🌱
The plan is to have each large area in Growing Wild to be a different biome with a new colour scheme! Each biome would have a few levels to renaturalize

I'll keep you in the loop about how these develop!
Which biome is your favourite?

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In our tower defense game Growing Wild - when you need precise, big damage look no further than the humble sniper plant! It can hit enemies at a great range - but only in one direction!! The kind of reliable, accurate shooter any scarecrow dreams of <3

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It just spawned… and now it’s gone. 👀
Something’s lurking out there — and it’s got perfect aim.
Find out more in our next showcase, dropping Tuesday! 💚

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Keep your distance. Stack your defenses.
And whatever you do… don’t let him through.

Big fists. Bigger problems.

This towering, gorilla-like brute is slow, but he can take a serious beating. If he gets close, he’ll slam the ground with a devastating shockwave. It’s not pretty — and it’s definitely bad news for you and your Magical Core.

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And of course, whenever you talk about SDFs, you need to give credit to @iquilezles.bsky.social

He has done extensive work on this topic and enabled all of this in first place. Check out his website for a lot more information on this, if you're interested! 🌱

We're currently in the process of refactoring this entire system because our requirements have outgrown our solution. That's not really a bad thing though! It gives us the opportunity to create an even more flexible and performant system.

By combining all of these fields, we can implement some cool emergent features, such as snapping plants to valid areas when trying to place them.

On top of the naturalized areas, we bake a bunch of additional information into SDFs as well:
🌻 The paths the enemies walk along.
🌻 The colliders of objects and obstacles in the level.,
🌻 The colliders of plants the player has already placed.

a circle with many circles around it like waves

a poly shape with many rounded versions of itself around it

(These example images already utilize some of the interesting properties of SDFs in order to draw outlines and such. The most basic visualization would be a lot more boring and less helpful.)

If we run these calculations for a series of points - for example, every pixel in a texture - we end up with a Signed Distance Field. Then, other objects only need to look at the pixel that corresponds to their location in the world, and can quickly tell if they are inside or outside a certain area.

A negative distance tells us that the point is inside of the shape. You can combine these distance functions in various ways to create even more complex composite shapes.

Signed Distance Fields (SDF) are one of my favorite hammers in my toolbox and this seemed like a juicy nail to hit with them. On a basic level Signed Distance Functions are mathematical functions that, for any point in space, calculate the distance to a particular shape, defined by some parameters.

What we needed was: a system to manage and store this information, to make it available to other systems in our game, and to pass it on to the effects and shaders that display it in form of the vegetation, fog etc!

🌻Laying the Groundwork!

To spread nature and drive back corruption is one of the main abilities necessary for our game Growing Wild. Various objects in our game define these areas, while others need to query and respond to this information.

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Oh, and they glow at night. Just saying. ✨

This little mushroom might not attack,but it’s doing some of the most important work out there!

You’ll need plenty of them to push the darkness back and expand your world — luckily, they’re as cute as they are crucial.

🍄Renewshrooms 🍄
You'll be planting a lot of these! In our upcoming game Growing Wild, they're your little helper holding back the corruption and expanding your world one small shroom at a time

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The actual output is very similar - as you can see on the screenshots - but it's the performance that counts!

In the revised version, all masks were moved to a single texture, distributed across the RGB-channels. Instead of several superimposed Fresnel effects, a single Fresnel is now used with UVs controlled via a gradient texture.

As a result, the effect is much more efficient and clearly structured.

The first version was tossed together as a prototype. Several textures and various Fresnel effects with different strengths were used simultaneously. Performance was not a factor.

a shader graph depicting a complicated mass of effects working together on one vfx

another shader graph of the same effect - but much smaller and much simpler.

The difference between an optimized and unoptimized shader!

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