For my writing project 3, I translated the article “Carnivorous Plants” (written by Rainer

Hedrich) into an RPG video in order to give the public more information about carnivorous

plants through interactive gameplay. I figured that since many people want to own a carnivorous

plant, this would be a good idea. In order to do this, I sprinkled NPCs (non playable characters)

in order to incorporate the facts about plants that Hedrich had stated in his article. However I

kept some important facts and put them in the main storyline because I figured they would add

more of an interesting factor to the plants you Encounter.

Originally the text was meant for people who don’t know anything about insectivorous

plants and had an interest in them and science. However, the large majority of people who

purchase carnivorous plants nowadays are doing it because they think they’re cool and pretty. A

lot of these people don’t really want to make time to read an academic article. By creating an rpg

game, a lot more people would make time to play it and have fun. When people have fun they

tend to retain information better! However, this isn’t to say that the article itself is boring! There

was a fun line in which Hedrich references one of my favorite old school movie and musical

“Little Shop of Horrors”. I used this line in the script of the game in order to do some world

building.

As I mentioned before, text in this game is used in NPC interactions and cutscenes in the

main storyline. I could not use all the text in the article due to the fact that rpg’s need a fluid

storyline, so I only used parts of the article that could be stated as stand alone facts. Luckily for

me, that was a majority of the article. One of the problems that I faced with this game was that I

had to create a fun and entertaining storyline out of Hedrich’s article. To do that I thought about

how carnivorous plants look awful and completely different than they normally do when they
start to die. I then had the idea to think about the death of the plants as a corruption that human’s

cause due to negligence and that the plants were trying to take revenge.

Creating the game was a difficult challenge. When I first started, I used an engine that

allowed me to change the coding of the scripting program I used in order to make the battling

system into one like Undertale’s in order to try to emphasize how patience and care is the key to

taking care of these plants. I spent a large amount of time trying to code it properly. Three days

before the due date of the final draft, I was only done with the tutorial level and I was still having

coding errors appear. I decided to scrap the entire project and recode the normal battle system

into the game. This time I made the magic abilities of the player into somewhat of a benefit to

the plants. The abilities are titled things such as “Distilled Water” and “Soil Change” in order to

instill into the player that these things damage Corrupted plants, which means they benefit

uncorrupted plants!

I worried that people would interpret that the plants were killed once they were defeated

so in order to do that I made the Corrupted Plants transform into their uncorrupted form after

their defeat. I also realized that I could incorporate some of Hedrich’s words into the descriptions

of my characters in order to ensure that the player retains the information. Another issue I

encountered was the animations. When attacking the plants, I wanted to make sure that it didn't

necessarily look like they were being damaged but rather healed. In order to do that I made sure

to use soft sound effects with the animations to make them seem like they aren’t so harmful. I

also had to lighten the colors in many of the animations other wise the darker colors would look

like they were hurting the plants.

 One of the conventions of my non-academic genre is that they tend to include shops and

areas where the characters could rest. However I did not incorporate this into my genre

translation. I believed that the game was too short to create resting centers, so what I did instead

was that I placed crystals across the game that the players can use to save the game before their

battles and regenerate their characters’ health bars and mana bars. I also completely left out

shops from the game. For one, I tuned the abilities of the characters to the strength I felt they

needed to be to make the battles entertaining, but beatable. I also just did not want to make it

seem as though I was encouraging violence against actual carnivorous flora. The only one who

fights with a weapon is the Gardner character, however his weapon is meant to help plants by

removing the infected portions!

Overall I enjoyed this project! I believe I did the original article justice and I even

incorporated Hedrich into the game in order to honor him.

Works Cited

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214014973