This game was inspired by various games in which the player cares virtual "pets" (Neopets, Tamagotchis, etc). The idea was to
create something cute enough that you wanted to take care of it, and would that hopefully also bring you satisfaction by doing so.
I wanted to create something joyful, relaxing, and fun; there's no way to lose, no way to accidentally kill your plants, and
no "wrong" way to use it. You can simply open the game, spend as much time with your plants as you want, then either close the
application or leave it running while you move onto something else. The audio element is meant to encourage interaction (the
happier your garden, the more harmonious the song), but also to provide a generally soothing and pleasant auditory experience.

The basic aesthetic of this game is "cuteness." I wasn't out to create something extremely complex or meaningful, my only goal
was to bring a smile to the player's. I kept the interaction minimal, while still giving the impression that the plants and the
scene responding to the user. An important feature I included is that there's no way to "hurt" your garden; your plants will be
unhappy until their needs are met, and the garden's song will be slightly discordant, but as soon as you start paying attention
to them again they will regain their happiness and continue to thrive. Your garden holds no grudges, and is always willing to
to accept however much love and attention you can give it.

PlantPals can be found here as an executable (make sure to keep the player and the data file next to the executable), or here as a Unity project.
Instructions are available within the application itself on the intro screen, but the interactions are quite simple. Each plant has three
needs that must be met for it to be happy: it needs sun, rain, and love. Your plants will get sun automatically, as long as the rays of
sunlight are not being blocked by the raincloud. Move the raincloud by blowing gently toward your device's microphone. To give your
plants love, simply talk or sing to them! Each plant will tell you what it needs most by the color of its aura. You will see pink rays if it
most needs love, blue rays for rain, and yellow rays for sunlight. Watch out for the birds! If they get too close, scare them away with a
loud noise or they will start to make your plants sad.

Once all three needs are met, your plant will show its happiness by smiling, and the pitch of its song will be in-tune. Each plant has its
own pitch, and your sonic garden will only be in harmony once all of the plants are happy. Once your plant is happy, continue meeting all
of its needs to help it thrive and grow; happiness is enough to make the garden harmonious, but additional care must be given to make it
grow. After a plant grows, it will be tired and grumpy; make sure to give it extra attention until it's happy and your sonic garden returns to its
harmonious state! You can change the key of the garden's song by pressing A-G on your keyboard, and you can quit at any time using the ESC key.

For more information on the brainstorming/design process, check out my initial design sketches and project ideas here, as well as an early draft.
The audio was the last feature added to this project because I felt it was the most important feature and I couldn't make up my mind about
what direction to go. I considered going more in the "cute/silly" direction and having them actually speak like the flowers in Alice in
Wonderland. I thought about having them parrot your words back to you, shouting their needs instead of using the colored auras, and even
just saying their own names like a Pokemon. However, I was worried that the silliness would detract from the overall aesthetic of the game;
while I was definitely going for "cute," I also wanted it to be peaceful, relaxing, and satisfying. I ended up deciding on the bell sounds
using a Banded Waveguide UGen in ChucK. You can find a schematic for my plan to have the sounds interact with the plant's health here
The timings of the different pitches are offset to create a windchime effect, but the timbre is quite similar to what I used for another project,
a coloring book-inspired meditative sequencer called ColorByTimbre. I liked the idea of tying multiple projects together using shared elements.
In fact, the whole idea of this game is also very similar to the first project for this class, a rain and rainbow-based audio visualizer called RainyMood.
My design aesthetic consistently focuses on things that are joyful and peaceful/meditative, which I think is captured perfectly by PlantPals.

My biggest metric of success/done-ness when I'm working on a project like this is whether it makes me happy, and whether I think that
experience is duplicatable by others. If the interface is too confusing/unclear for another person to understand (someone who hasn't
spent weeks designing and building the game, for example), I know that it's not done yet. I want everything to be easy to use, and bring
smiles and satisfaction to people other than myself. I could also tell I was getting close to my final version when I started getting
invested in the happiness of the flowers. I was bummed when I couldn't get them all to smile, or when I'd finally get them all happy and
then one would grow and throw the chord off-balance again. This inspired me to create an "end" to the game, so that once your flowers were
"fully grown," they would just stay happy and harmonious basically indefinitely until you quit the game.

Good luck, and enjoy cultivating your sonic garden!