Aflutter: Butterfly Garden

Plant flowers that attract butterflies, then watch as they visit. Collect the sparkles they drop to plant more flowers, and catch beetles to grow mushrooms.

My fellow plant nerds and nature enthusiasts will appreciate the art. Much care was taken to make each species accurate and recognizable to people familiar with it. For butterflies, this includes accurate coloration for males and females on both sides of each wing.

Real and imaginary butterfly species are included, alongside real plant species.

The game is short. Expect to unlock all content in about 20-30 minutes. After that, you can still spend as much time arranging your garden as you would like.

Development: I thought it would be cool to write my own game in my own game engine. So I spent 6 months making a basic networked 3D OpenGL engine in Java and a little asteroid shooter to go in it. I built on that for this project, which was started on May 2, 2023, and was intended to be completed in 6 months. Well, here it is three years later, and I'm finally publishing it.

AI Usage: 1% of the code is AI-generated, specifically the gltf parser. This fixed a subtle bug with butterfly texture coordinates which I had been avoiding for two years. On the whole the existence of AI is not worth it, and I fully support a complete halt to the training of ever-larger models.