PLANT THERAPY
Plant Therapy is a cozy indie game created by the three-person team Short Leg Studio. In Plant Therapy, you’re living in your new New York City apartments and decorating it with none other than plants. You care for your plants by feeding and watering them, and they reward you with coins that help you buy furniture, decorations, or, of course, more plants. Although the premise is simple, the game is anything but.
I was very excited to see my apartment bloom with greenery, and excited to save for new plants and planters to put them in. While I didn’t have enough time to play and see it happen, plants can grow and bloom in this game, filling your space with even more vibrancy. I did have the pleasure of seeing the nighttime sequence many times, where plants change colors and create a fun little scene. If you’re looking for a cozy, clean, relaxing game, I highly recommend checking out Plant Therapy.
Plant Therapy is currently free on Steam with purchasable DLC. There are also plans for an iOS version to be released in August. We are excited to see the future of Plant Therapy, and I can’t wait to start building my very own blooming Brooklyn apartment.
Sarah: Alright, I'm here today with Plant Therapy’s Jennevieve at GeekFest. How are you doing?
Jennevieve: I'm doing great. This is an awesome show.
Sarah: Yeah! So let our listeners know who are you? What do you do?
Jennevieve: My name is Jennevieve Schlemmer and I am an artist. So I have an artist background. And my husband and I and friend started a Short Leg Studio during the pandemic, and started working on our first video game Plant Therapy.
Sarah: Can you explain Plant Therapy for us?
Jennevieve: Sure. Plant Therapy is a cozy plant collecting game that you collect plants and artwork for your New York City apartment. And you unlock and get to play in lots of different apartments all over New York City.
Sarah: Awesome. So what got you into creating a cozy game?
Jennevieve: Well, I always wanted to make a game. But I of course, as an artist, you know, life gets in the way and you never have time. And you never know when you're going to do something. And then it happened that my husband and I, Trevor, were living in New York during the pandemic. And we were literally locked inside our apartment and couldn't go anywhere. And I couldn't work in an art studio or do the normal art shows and things that I did. And so I started taking classes online, on how to make video games. And also a big change in my life was when I got my iPad Pro in 2019. And then that really opened up the world for me, because now I could make art really quickly and easily to play and put in video games.
Sarah: Awesome. I feel like the pandemic started a lot of indie games, weirdly enough,
Jennevieve: We had a lot of time to play, and think, and practice and really put time into it before when we're like, oh, we're too busy doing this or that.
Sarah: Yeah. What are you most excited for in your game? I know your game is out right now on Steam. And you guys have some DLC, right? What is it that you are most excited for in the future or just to see with Plant Therapy?
Jennevieve: Well, we're working on adding another DLC, the base game is 100% free to play. And then the DLCs are just a way to expand your game, support us as developers. But we've got three DLCs… four DLCs now! Sorry, we just put one out. And we're working our fifth one that I'm really excited about that's at Coney Island, and you're going to have the amusement park in the background. And now you're going to have wallpaper. Wveryone's been asking for since we put this out the demo. Everyone wanted to say: “Can we put wallpaper on our walls? Can we change our paint color?” And then now we're working on that. So I'm really, really excited about that.
Sarah: Oh, that's awesome. That's one of those things, whenever developers add like little things like that, we never realized how much goes into it. And how cool like those little things are.
Jennevieve: It's an unbelievable amount of work to get this one little thing functioning in the game.
Sarah: I’m sure!
Jennevieve: And it's totally adding a whole new feature. But so many people have asked for it that we really are excited about it.
Sarah: Alright, and then I have a strange question for you. If you could go back in time and either change one thing or give yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?
Jennevieve: I would say just go for it would be my advice. I suffered a lot from imposter syndrome, and that I didn't think I was good enough. Or I needed more training or I needed to go to school more. Or I needed one more workshop or one more person to give me… You know, I needed that person to point to me and say you can do this. But I needed to point at myself and say you can do this.
Sarah: I love that. Alright. And now here's your time plug yourself plug your game, what do the people need to know?
Jennevieve: We are out on Steam now, Plant Therapy, is 100% free to play the base game. And we are coming out on iOS so you can get on your iPads and your phone in August. So that's really exciting. And then hopefully Android will be soon after that. But go to Steam and we have a great active Discord. And you can find out all of our follow us and find out everything that's going on. And then also be one of those people that gives us feature requests and ask for things like wallpaper and then we'll do it!
Sarah: We love interactive communities like that! Oh my gosh. Alright. Well, that was Jennevieve with Plant Therapy. It was such a pleasure talking with you.
Jennevieve: Thank you. Thank you so much for talking to me.
Sarah: Yeah, I hope you have a great rest of your convention.
