Treeplanter: Plant real trees is a small, quiet experiment. It manages to do something most big-budget games wouldn’t dream of. If you buy this game, Henry Driver, who is the lead dev and a farmer himself, actually goes out and plants a sapling. Then he takes care of it fir years to come. We feel that’s a very honest trade. You get a digital garden. The planet gets a real one.
Lego-Style Placement: Build small woodland dioramas by snapping together trees and natural elements. It’s zero grid-placement friction.
Split-Level Observation: The camera allows players to view the above-ground ecosystem and the below-ground root and fungi networks simultaneously.
Procedural Attraction: The specific flora and fauna that populate your diorama are generated organically. It’s based on the types of items you choose to build.
Dirt, Roots, and Lego Logic
In Treeplanter, we snap trees and plants together using a system that you’ll love or hate depending on your relationship with Legos. It’s tactile and easy. But the part that actually caught us off guard is what’s happening beneath the surface. We can actually peek under the soil and watch root systems and fungi networks stretch out as the seasons change. These are not gameplay mechanics, just a cool way of seeing how things meaningfully change.
In that regard it’s definitely less of a game and more of a digital fidget toy. It’s satisfying to build a little grove, and eventually, the birds and critters just show up. They move in because we’ve made a space for them. We look at Treeplanter and we think it’s nice to have something this cool to poke at while you’re winding down for the night. It’s presentation is simple, but effective. It also feels very human.
A Classroom Project That Actually Made It
Treeplanter was made with a lot of love and dedication, by a group of 18-to-21-year-old students in a rural mentorship program.
Henry Driver led the project, but the students from the Eastern Education Group gave it their all with the art and those cool underground systems. It’s hard not to feel that educational spark in the final product. It did get a professional glow up from Rianna Suen and Halime Karaca, but, the core still remains a student project that grew up and found a home with Future Friends Games.
Running on Sunshine
Lead developer Henry Driver is a sixth-generation farmer. During the game’s development cycle alone, he already planted 900 trees on farms and schools in Suffolk.
Treeplanter was extensively playtested at LEVEL, a charity for special educational needs and disabilities. There, it was presented to players aged 5 to 85 inside an immersive 4K projector wraparound room.
The game was designed from the ground up to quietly combine meditation with education. It’s meant to specifically teach players how natural elements interact below the soil line.
The Final Breakdown
As a digital stress ball Treeplanter is lovely. If you have a spare bucks, treat yourself with a digital nirvana. You’ll be treating Earth with another sapling because of it. The student-led art is charming and the real-world impact is something we wish we saw more often.
ID Card
- Developer: Henry Driver, Rianna Suen, Halime Karaca & Eastern Education Group Students
- Publisher: Future Friends Games
- Engine: Indie / Custom
- Platforms: PC, Mac
- Release Date: April 17, 2026
- Genre: Cozy Toybox / Simulation
Dev & Play Media 
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