Flowers For You

Synopsis: Flowers For You is a short cozy puzzle game, intended as a personalized birthday gift, made in a short time.

The goal was to have a complete experience, with mechanics simple enough for the recipient, and be cute.

Link to the game: kimzalabim.itch.io (coming soon)

Overview:

Type:	Gamejam
Duration:	2 weeks
Primary Roles:	Art, mechanic & puzzle design, programming
Team:	Solo
Engine:	Unity
Other tools:	MS Paint, digital drawing pad.

Process:

1. Setting the goal & concept:

Creating an experience that for the recipient is:
- fun and challenging enough,
- pleasant, cozy and cute,
Identifying the requirements, constraints & affordances and potential directions.
MOSCOW model for scoping.

Gameplay:

2. Creating a cozy puzzle mechanic:

The main mechanic needed to:

be simple and easily understood & fit thematically.
have enough design space to remain interesting for the entire experience.
be modular so it could be (re)used and combined with other mechanics.

3. Making simple puzzles:

Prototyping several puzzles by using the existing mechanic.
Use the puzzles as building blocks to sketch out the game progression.
Identify gaps (that still needed puzzles), and which puzzles to exclude.
Game progression followed a buildup of mechanics & puzzles.

Creating a cozy artstyle:

Part 1: Watercolor texture:

Started with a royalty free watercolor texture. Edited it into black and white version.
Placed the BW texture in the scene, colored it with the spriterenderer to a specific color & setting it to a specific sorting layer.
Have spritemasks use the different colored texture layers.
To create a dynamic feel, animated the texture sheet to flip their x, y (and combinations).
To create variation, each texture sheet has a random rotation.

Part 2: “handdrawn” Assets:

With references, use a combination of tracing and redrawing in MS Paint.
Made an outline, and a fully blacked out version for masking.
Once in engine, the blacked out versions spritemasked to specific color sheets (layers).
The outline was placed as a sprite and slightly offset with the colored body to give a “painted in” feel.
The spritemasked parts were animated ever so slightly (like swaying in the wind) to make the flowers more alive.