De-Flower

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Fri, 24 Oct 2008
Subject: De-flower

De-Flower was originally planned t0 be our third release for Zee-3, after Naked War and [top secret mystery game], and is planned for both Windows PC and Mac, which would have made it our first ever Mac game!

It's a single screen puzzle game where you have to remove the singing flowers by bouncing them around the play area and joining their petals together.

It was planned as a kind of spiritual successor to Sticky Balls, and the logical extension of the ideas we starting thinking about for that game, but with some new ideas added, and a bit more character and personality injected into the mix.

We developed a playable prototype way back in 2004, while working on Naked War, and the game really worked, even in a simplified form. We even got a little bit of press for the prototype in the GamesTM preview section (I don't have a copy of the issue in question, so can't include a scan here), from the time when it was definitely going to be our next game.

We did a fair bit of work on the graphics, but I don't think we were ever happy with the look we'd got. It was probably the first attempt to do something in-game based on my drawing style, but I don't think I was approaching it in the right way. I was half way between doing hand drawn stuff, and making video game graphics, so the style was somewhere in between the two extremes. I don't think I was confident enough in my drawing at the time, and was hiding behind photoshop effects a little bit.

Schedule-wise our plans changed. A new project took priority after Naked War, and this remained on the back burner. We're still very confident about the game though, and we have a plan to return to the De-Flower prototype once the new game is out, and perhaps reinvent the visual style completely, maybe even collaborating with a guest artist...

Tags: prototype, coding, indie, sketch, game design, biro

Follow up post: De-Flower Prototype

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