Design Statement
I felt the music had a sense of techno-optimism with a twinge of nostalgia. There's a cassette or VHS sound at the start, which made me feel like we were looking back at the past from a better future, especially with the sounds of nature, and the electronic skew to the instrumentation.

This led me to design 'reseed'*, a game about rewilding a dead planet after failing to care for our own. I researched the goldilocks zone, and potentially habitable planets, and thought about life after earth, and how life could start again.

I took inspiration from the mechanics of Paper.io 2 (which took inspiration from games like Qix!) where you draw a path to capture territories. I thought it was interesting to take what is a sort of militaristic/imperialistic mechanic and flip it in its head and instead make it about growth and abundance.

*The idea of 'reseeding' and not 'seeding' implies there was life there before. This is further alluded to with the man-made ruins on the planet. Who or what remains a mystery.

Game Instructions (launch steps, controls, and gameplay overview)
RESEED: HOW TO PLAY

It's 2126. You've landed on a barren planet. Your job is to bring it back to life.

LAUNCHING THE GAME

Recommended: download the game for the best performance.

1. On the game's itch.io page, download the build for your system (Windows, Mac or Linux).
2. Unzip it and open the game:
- Windows: run Reseed.exe
- Mac: open Reseed.app
- Linux: run the Reseed file (you may need to mark it as executable first)
3. Plug in a gamepad before you start if you want to use one.
4. Press Enter (or A on a gamepad), then choose Single Player, or Multiplayer to host or join an online match.

Can't download? Click "Run game" on the itch.io page to play in a desktop browser (Chrome recommended). It runs slower than the download.

GAMEPLAY

- FILL UP: Drive to your seed bank (the crate by your landing pod) and press Refill.
- RIDE TO GROW: Your hoverbike sows your colour of grass wherever it goes.
- CLOSE LOOPS: Ride a loop and join it back up. Everything inside turns to meadow. Bigger loops, bigger meadows.
- CLAIM RUINS: Loop around a ruin to take its seed bank. You can capture other players' pod banks too, so guard your own.
- WATCH YOUR SEEDS: Boosting uses seeds, and a hard crash spills them. Refill at any seed bank you hold.

SEED DROPS (pick these up for a bonus)
- Seed bloom: a burst of your grass
- Seed refill: tops up your seeds
- Speed boost: go faster for a while
- Bigger seed tank: carry more seeds
- Wide tracks: a wider trail for a while
- Steady seeds: crashes don't spill seeds for a while
- Scout flare: reveals the whole map

HOW TO WIN
- Planet won: once every seed bank belongs to someone, whoever holds the most banks wins (ground covered breaks a tie).
- Last one standing: no seed bank and no seeds left means you're out. Be the last player in.
- Time's up: if there's a time limit, race back to your pod before the countdown ends.

TEAMS: Pick another player's colour in Customise to join their side.


CONTROLS (keyboard & mouse / gamepad)

Steer ............ W A S D or arrow keys / Left stick
Look ............. Mouse / Right stick
Boost ............ Shift / RT, B or click left stick
Hop .............. Q / A
Refill seeds ..... E / X
Recentre camera .. Space / Click right stick
Map .............. M / View (Select)
Pause ............ Esc / Start

When you're out:
Watch others ..... Left/Right arrows / D-pad left/right
Quit to menu ..... Enter / View (Select)

Local split screen: in the lobby, each extra player presses Space or A on their own controller to join.
All controls except the gamepad's left stick can be changed in Settings > Controls.

Gameplay walkthrough video
https://youtu.be/32StnZ9muek

Trailer / Other Additional Video Material (Optional)
https://youtu.be/DXDF49tmq4o?si=W0Kdotkyb-Ra2N1D

Did your project use any AI tools or assets? If yes, please specify.
No AI-generated player-facing assets including art, music, sound, writing etc.

I did use AI to help me with some code stuff. A few examples:
- I made a standard grass shader myself, but I needed help from AI to port it to a compute shader so the game would run at a decent framerate.
- I had to use the experimental WebGPU graphics API so I could get compute shader support in browser, but this created some super weird bugs I needed AI help debugging.
- Optimising the flood fill algorithm and making it multi-threaded.