Arabilis – Mobile
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nl.timovervliet.arabilis
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Credits:
Game Design – Tim Overvliet
Programming – Tim Overvliet
Art & UI – Tim Overvliet
Music – PurplePlanet.com
Sound – Soniss.com
Special Thanks:
My amazing girlfriend Ellen, thanks for being so patient with me (L), my parents for all your support, Adriaan, Mitch, Will, Freek, Ion, Steve thank you for helping me testing this one. Dennis thanks for the great feedback. Marco couldn’t have done this without your support. Godot Engine and community thank you, this engine is something special.
Ideas behind the game
Arabilis was inspired by a couple of things. First of all it’s not a secret I love Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons. I mainly love those games because of the simple farming mechanics, growing vegetables just feels nice but in those games it takes time. I wanted to make something that distills that experience of growing things and make it quick and easy but harvesting should still be satisfying.
Now here comes a random dream I had one night, I woke up at 4:00 in the morning and the base concept or Arabilis just popped in my head. I wrote it down in my design trello board (I keep a small trello board where I just scribble design ideas onto). This is an exact copy paste from that board:
“Farmbased puzzle game. Grow and plant crops while the day passed (this off lumines). End of the day you score points based on how efficient you grew your plants. Seasons change the available crops and weather and disasters change the grid layout”
It’s pretty neat to see that this is pretty much exactly like how Arabilis is today.
Another big inspiration came from my father. He is an avid vegetable grower in his own garden and for me it was allways so cool to see the difference each time I came to visit. From barren vegetable paddies to lush greens everwhere, it was soo satisfying. Ofcourse the fact that these were also the best vegetables you could eat also helped.
Two things stood out for me and my fathers garden. The fact you needed to plan each season and where things should grow. Vegetables do better when you keep them close to plants they like being close to. It’s called companion planting and it’s something Arabilis heavily relies on. Another thing that stood out was crazy big vegetables! If you would like these things just sit the garden without harvesting them they could sometimes grow to massive sizes. I remember seeing pumpkins that two people simply could not lift! I knew I wanted that in the game aswell.
Now almost a full year since that night I had that dream has passed. Ellen and I have been traveling throughout europe, working hard and playing hard and now it’s finally here. Arabilis is about to launch, I can not wait what you think about it and I hope you enjoy playing it.
- Tim