FLOWERZ

So I was sorting all my old boxes in the attic last night, and I found this weird old floppy disk with a manual. I was intrigued and boooted up my old PC, popped the floppy in and tried the game out. I thought some people could be interested in it, that's why I'm putting it online. I've scanned some pages from the game manual and put them below.

Enjoy!

The idea behind the project was to try and re-create something that looks and feels like an old game you'd find stashed away in your attic. I went for simple shapes while modeling and wrote a shader that, given a certain pixel width and height, floors the average colors in each pixel. This gave the game a simple pixelated look while not taking a lot of performance. Here's a comparison with and without the shader applied to the camera:

The shader allows for a retro feel but also for simple, fast to produce models that feature iconic looks for each flower.

As seen above, the game revolves around flowers. While making the game and the manual, I gave myself a 2 month deadline: 1 for the manual and game prototype (which had to be sent to the zine team) and another month for graphics, sound, and polish.

The game idea is simple: the player can plant 3 different flowers, that each have their own color.
When the flowers bloom, they can fuse with other close ones to create a new flower. Those new flowers can also fuse, which in turn creates other ones.
However, each flower can only fuse with other specific flowers, so sometimes 2 very close flowers won't fuse (for scope purpuses!), so the player needs to keep track of the results of the fusions they make.
Since every flower has its specific color, I focused on their sizes and shapes to make them recognizable.

The objective of the game is to find the fusion that creates the black flower. While looking for it, the players may discover the different plants (14 unique ones) and create their own garden.

Despite the pixelation shader, the flowers are easy to distinguish. You may also notice that some of them are alone, while some others are in clumps. Basically, the more fusions you need to make to obtain the flower, the bigger the clump!

As seen above, to discover a new flower, you need to fuse. Each flower has a script applied to it that includes a fusion radius, which can be tuned in the inspector to allow for each flower prefab to have a different radius.

When the player plants a flower, it grows for a few seconds. When it reaches its full size, it looks within its radius for overlapped radii from other flowers.
All the flowers that have an overlapping radius are stored in a list, which is then sorted by distance (closest to farthest). The script then checks every flower in the sorted list to see if it's fully grown, not already fusing and not dead. After 100 seconds without fusing, the flower can't fuse anymore.

So far, the game mechanic works fine. However, it's still lacking features to make it pop out and be more pleasant to play.

There is also a big problem: the players have no way to know what the fuse radii are for each flower!
To solve that, every flower will now emit pollen particles for its life duration (100 seconds). The particles are emitted in each flower's fuse radius in a great number at the start of the life cycle. The number of particles diminishes over time, and at the end of the flower's life cycle there are none left.
This gives the players a way to estimate the fuse radius and the remaining lifetime for every flower without adding too much UIthat would take too much space on the screen when a large number of flowers are blooming.

This feature is pretty handy, but it still lacks some dynamism... The players have no way to know for sure when a flower is done growing. But hear me out, what about a pollen explosion when the flower is fully grown and starts emitting pollen? That sounds more exciting than just having some particles fly around!

I also added yet another particle system to signal when flowers are fusing: in the middle of the line segment between the 2 fusing flowers, a column of pollen rises with the colors of both flowers, at the location where the new flower will grow.

As you may see, I also added some simple sounds to have more feedback when sowing.

I then added some UI, sounds and menus to have a complete game experience, from start to finish. I also implemented a feature that saves a picture of the player's garden with no UI in a folder, when they discover the black flower.

The game is available on itch.io, if you would like to try it out!
https://rottingmalon.itch.io/flowerz