Growtopia/Concepts

This page lists art and concepts 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 Growtopia

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These mock-up screenshots were originally made by Seth using stolen ripped sprites.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

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

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 third 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".

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

Modern Growtopia

Concept Art

November 2021

• Space Badger[2]
  Space Badger
• Space Dog[2]
  Space Dog
• Space Mouse[2]
  Space Mouse
• Space Pig[2]
  Space Pig
• Space Rabbit[2]
  Space Rabbit

March 2022

• Royal Alpha Wolf[3]*
  Royal Alpha Wolf*

*Note: The original time-lapse video can be viewed here.

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.

File:M1.png

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.

File:M2.png

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

File:GT early logo.png

External Links

• Two guys made an MMO: The Growtopia Postmortem