Growtopia/Concepts

This page lists concept art and unused content for the game Growtopia. There are also earlier ideas for the game. These concepts began production in 2012, several months before the game's launch in 2013.

Early Name

Before the game came out, cocreators Seth Robinson and Mike Hommel came up with the original name Buildo. Ultimately, however, the name Growtopia was chosen, as Buildo was already used as the name of a series of sticker book apps.

Concept Art

As seen in earlier concept art for the game, the concept of growing trees was already designed to be a key mechanic in the game, although at that time trees weren't meant to drop items when harvested, for they dropped consumable berries instead.

These mock-up screenshots were originally made by Seth using stolen ripped sprites. They were presented to his Mike Hommel, his friend, better known as his alias Hamumu, to convince him to join the project, which he did.

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  Concept of the world selection menu
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  Concept of "zones", a.k.a. worlds
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  Concept of chatting
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  Concept of block placement
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  Concept of trees
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  Concept of a PvP mechanic, seemingly later adapted to the Game Generator

Earlier Gameplay

As seen in earlier screenshots of the game, the currently selected item had red borders, as opposed to the four yellow corners that are in the game to this day. A message was also sent in the player's chat when they selected an item in their inventory.

The lock seen in the screenshot is not the Huge Lock, rather a scrapped item which behaved and looked like one but was called "Lock". Its ID was 60, being replaced by Portcullis. This information can be found by digging into the APKs of older versions for a file named "item_definitions.txt".

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  GUI designs, which started to resemble the used final version
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  An older prototype of the game, with basic collision and stuff working
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  Accessing another player to the Lock
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  Since World Locks were yet in the game, players clumped together in worlds, locking their own areas with the smaller lock types

Original Source Files

A few *.psd files show up in certain builds of the game.

Slow Net (network.psd)

The original sprite has a size of 32×32, but this is a higher resolution at 64×64.

Generic Menu (generic_menu.psd/main_menu.psd)

This appears to be an early version of generic_menu.rttex, which, in the final, is tinted blue.

This file also contains an early logo concept for Growtopia, looking like this:

External Link

• Two guys made an MMO: The Growtopia Postmortem