FLOWERZ
Solo game, Sandbox, PC & Keyboard

The process

My starting idea was to have the players build a habitat for various bugs and insects by growing various plants and trees.
However, while iterating on the idea I quickly realized that the scope was way too big for a 2-months long project.

I wanted to keep a nature based setting, and decided to have the players fuse different flowers together.

Since my project was built around the idea of an old game manual, I wanted to give it a retro vibe with pixelated graphics, as if the game was on a floppy disk that the player found in their attic.

I then had to make a lot of 3D assets for all the flower and environment models, as well as sound effects and particle systems. I also implanted a random audio playlist using Unity's built-in audio module, which includes ambient and new age music with natural themes. After setting up all these features, I made the scene a little more pleasing to the eye by using a custom skybox from the asset store, and set up some lights.

The camera has a shader script assigned to it, which downsamples what the camera sees and copies it onto a render texture.

The last thing left to do before release was to make some 2D assets and have a working UI. I went for something simple, since I didn't have much time remaining and needed to run some more playtests.

After getting feedback from playtests, I had only 1 day remaining before the release date (deadline) I fixed earlier in the week. I spent that last day fixing some bugs that remained, changed the flower instanciation script to make them spawn with a random rotation, and added a function that takes a screenshot of the scene when the black fower has been found, to give players a nice reward for winning. 

There were 2 more features I wanted to add to the game, but I ended up cutting them from the 1.0 release to have some time to finish making the trailer. The game successfully released on 28/01/2024.

This project was a very nice one to work on. The small timeframe was a little bit stressful but I pushed through by making a schedule for unfinished tasks, which allowed me to keep focus and progress much faster.

I'm also glad that Miam Editions chose my project to be a part of their fanzine since I'm planning on leaving my hometown, and being a part of the local culture is something that's very dear to me.