Seed
STUDIO — All Seeing Eye
CLIENT — Wellcome Trust & Epic Games
Seed is a game prototype which allows players to breed and grow procedural plant life in Virtual Reality.
Seed was produced as a response to Developing Beyond, a $500,000 year-long development competition by Epic Games and Wellcome in which teams created new games IP using Epic’s Unreal Engine. The game would go onto to win the competition, ultimately beating over 100 other teams to the top spot.
What’s it about?
Seed is influenced by the term ‘garage biotech’ – a movement beginning in the early 1900’s where amateur scientists and tinkerers began to bio-hack plantlife to create their own varieties.
Trailblazers of this time would often use dangerous chemicals and process’ in pursuit of their goals, such as scraping radioactive radium from watch-faces for application to their rose buds. All of this was in an effort to generate spontaneous positive mutations; rolling the dice in the genetics of the plant.
In Seed players are encouraged to grow, hack, hybridise and discover plant life with the intent of solving or in some cases intentionally causing problems based on real world scenarios. The player is immersed into a visually stunning environment, allowing them to craft unique and beautiful plants which grow quickly before their eyes. The game systems also procedurally simulate the Mendelian genetics in each plant variety.
What did I do?
I was Creative Lead on Seed and ultimately responsible for maintaining the creative vision for the project. In this role I also lead in defining the experience through concept art, game design, writing and UX. I lead the project from writing the initial funding bid to final prototype submission, and ultimately our team winning the competition.
“The jury was unanimous in voting for Seed as the deserved winner of this year’s Developing Beyond. All Seeing Eye have created a beautiful place to explore and spend time in, as well as delivering great gameplay”
— Mike Gamble, European Territory manager, Epic Games
Scientific Collaboration
A key requirement of the competition was that we collaborated with an academic researcher to help inform and steer the prototype. Game concepts also had to reflect the theme ‘transformations’ and tie into the goals of Wellcome.
We collaborated with Dr Helen Anne Curry from Cambridge University. Helen is a science historian with in-depth knowledge of the history of plant breeding and its impact on culture. Her research and input helped to form many of the key mechanics in the prototype.
I was responsible for forming and maintaining the relationship with our researcher for the project, regularly meeting with her throughout the process.
Helen’s book, EVOLUTION Made to Order was a key text in influencing the mechanics and process’ in the experience.
