Writing Project 3 Reflection
Lately many of my friends have been adopting carnivorous plants and I have been
seeing an increased interest in this subspecies of plants growing on the internet. Watching
carnivorous plants such as Venus flytraps, sundews, and bladderworts being paraded
around and treated like normal plants slightly upsets me, so I decided to take my
frustration and channel it into something constructive. After reading Rainer Hedrich’s
article titled “Carnivorous Plants” I decided to use that article for my genre translation and
translated it into an RPG video game in order to spread basic tips and information about
these plants. I decided that translating the article into an RPG was a good idea because I
could achieve my goal of sharing information about carnivorous plants by including NPCs
that provide fun facts about carnivorous plants when you interact with them. Not only that,
but it has also been suggested that people learn better through hands on activities, like how
students who take chemistry lectures also have to take chemistry labs in order for them to
see the reactions they are learning about in action.
The original text was meant for those who had an interest in carnivorous plants but
had no scientific knowledge about them. However, most people who purchase carnivorous
plants nowadays are doing it because they think they’re cool and pretty, not because they
genuinely care about the wellbeing of the plant and want to help it grow to its full potential.
These same people would have no interest in an article like this because it is not
stimulating or trendy. By creating an RPG game and promoting it properly, a lot more
people would find a way to make time to play it, have fun, and, most importantly, learn
about this unique species of flora. I know this would be an effective translation because
people tend to learn better while having fun and participating in interactive activities.
Deleted: 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.¶
Deleted: Originally the text was meant for people who
don’t know anything about insectivorous plants and had
an interest in them and science.
Deleted: the large majority of
Deleted: . A lot of these people don’t really want to make
time to read an academic article
Deleted: rpg
Deleted: and have fun
Deleted: When
Deleted: e
Deleted: fun
However, this isn’t to say that the article itself is boring! There was a fun line in which Deleted: they tend to retain information better!

Hedrich references one of my favorite old school movies and musical “Little Shop of Deleted: movie

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 Deleted: rpg

fluid storyline, so I only used parts of the article that could be stated as standalone facts. Deleted: stand alone

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.

I knew that making this game would pose to be a challenge due to the time crunch I was Formatted: Font: Times New Roman
Formatted: Line spacing: Double
on and the limited resources I had at my disposal. In the beginning phase of the creation process,

I decided to use an engine that allowed me to change the limitations of the scripting program I

was using and allowed me to create a battle system identical to Undertale’s. I wanted to do this

because Undertale’s battle system emphasizes passivity and patience by giving the option to

defend yourself against enemies and talk things out with them. I thought that my game would

benefit from this battle system because it would encourage the players to not harm the plants in

the game and instead be patient with them, much like how they must be patient with plants in

real life. However, three days before the final draft was due, I had only managed to complete the

tutorial level and I was still struggling with coding errors. In order to be able to make the due

date, I scraped the Undertale battle system and went with the normal battle system instead. I then
tailored the abilities in a way that made them seem more like they were benefitting the corrupted

plants instead of harming them. An example of this is that I made and named abilities things like

“Distilled Water” and “Soil Change”, which are things that carnivorous flora benefit from. I

believed that by seeing that these things would uncorrupt plants, people would make the

association that the things the abilities are named after are things that should be given to their

own carnivorous plants.

Deleted: Creating the game was a difficult challenge.

I worried that people would interpret that the plants were killed once they were
defeated so I made the Corrupted Plants transform into their uncorrupted form after their
defeat in an attempt to resolve that issue, which I believe worked fairly well. 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. In RPGs like Pokémon, animations are used to signify damage being dealt to
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!
Deleted: in order to do that

the enemies. 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.

Anything with a deep tone would sound as if it hurt. I also had to lighten the colors in many

of the animations otherwise the darker colors would look like they were hurting the plants. Deleted: other wise
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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 Deleted: However

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!

Another aspect of the translation that I found to be quite difficult was keeping

Hedrich’s tone. In the article, he was very enthusiastic about the topic of carnivorous flora

and it was extremely infectious. I knew I wanted to keep that tone in the genre translation,

but in the end, I realized it would not have been able to stay. The difference between an

article and a game is the fact that the article is the way the information is relayed. In an

article, only one person’s tone needs to be represented throughout the entire thing. In a

videogame, however, the tone actually shifts. Even if there is only one person creating the

game, there are still multiple tones through out the whole game. This is due to the fact that

the dialogue needs to be shaped in a way that each character has their own personality.

Because of this, the energetic tone is not completely there.

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

incorporated Hedrich into the game in order to honor him.

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Works Cited

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