The Healing Tree

A cozy narrative platformer about healing and growth.

Play it here: https://tallysummers.itch.io/thehealingtree

Project Summary

The Healing Tree was created as a group client project, building upon research by Hailey Austin and Lydia Cooper: Feeling the Narrative Control(ler): casual art games as trauma therapy.

I took many different roles on this project, including art direction, design, and some production. You can read more about this below.

Our sources of inspiration for this project were Spiritfarer and Mutazione, so it was really important to the team that we created a very relaxing experience with pastel nature-inspired art to complement this. We were also very much prioritising player choice, offering a range of dialogue options, and allowing players to freely decorate the world.

The game trailer can be found on the left.

Many thanks to Hailey Austin, Lydia Cooper, Martin Lynagh, and Robin Griffiths. 

Art Direction

The design and art for this game were very highly interlinked. The design of this game was highly reliant upon the art in order to have the desired effect on the player, and this game was very much a case of design complimenting art, rather than art complimenting design. This meant that it was really important to have good communication between the art and design teams, which was the purpose of my role here. 

I created this mood board to give the artists a starting point for the artistic style and theming (right). It consists mostly of Art Nouveau pieces with major naturistic influences, lots of muted colours, and ornate detail. I also created the sketch on the right-hand side of this mood board to show its application for a possible asset - the cocoon. This was only just a baseline, so the style definitely drifted a bit, but its influence can still be recognized in the final artwork.

I also created some mood boards for the artists to use when designing the characters and their homes. An example of this, for the character of Warsan, can be seen below.

Moodboard created by me for the character of Warsan

Final Warsan design by Cristi

Quest Design

Working with the other designer on the team, we created this list of potential quest objectives and actions for the NPCs to give to the player.

We made sure to split the quests by goal whilst also listing a few different ways the player could complete this goal to ensure the quests didn't feel too repetitive. For each goal, we cross-referenced these with all of the different mechanics available to the player to see how these intersect and made sure to note down all of the different options that worked within the context of the goal.

We took inspiration from games like Stardew Valley to create some options for objectives that are ingrained into the world itself, and Professor Layton for our more puzzle-based ideas.

Summary of other tasks

QA

Art

Design