Reach for the Sun is a game about the plant life cycle aimed at 6th – 8th graders. In Reach for the Sun, players take on the role of a plant, managing its resources over the growing season as it sprouts, grows, respires, photosynthesizes, and produces flowers, pollen, and hopefully seeds. Beyond the first plant, which can act as a tutorial, players can grow several other types of plants, each of which have different growth and resource use profiles that players can learn to optimize. In response to feedback from Reach for the Sun’s release on Steam, we designed a turn-based strategy mode to accompany the time-based standard mode of play. Reach for the Sun’s Strategy Mode allows players to spend time considering resource costs and benefits before they make each turn’s decision about investing in growth, photosynthesis, or reproduction (see Figures 1 and 2). In strategy mode, resource costs are explicit, and the game shows what resources will be gained at the end of the turn based on the plant parts the player has grown so far (see Figure 3).
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