ExSpore

Growth. Limitless. What comes to mind? For us - it was community. Communities always start small, but always retain the potential to grow. We wanted to gamify this process of building a diverse community of various individuals and what better way to simulate this than with mushrooms - notorious for rapid and limitless growth.

Ex-spore is a 2D clicker game that allows a user to build up a network of diverse mushrooms of different shapes, colours, and sizes. The aim of the game is build up your network as much as you can by pressing u to upgrade once you have enough spores (mushroom points equivalent). It draws from graph-theoretic themes, such as 6 degrees of separation to show that all it takes is as little as a few connections per mushroom to build up a whole colony. As with most clicker games, the game features the ability to unlock automatic clicking, and has changing incentives for the user the more their network grows. It also has a botanical notebook that displays a collection of all the different shrooms, flowers, and trees you have managed to include and grow as part of your community.