Today marks the one-year anniversary of death by flower arrangement’s release on itch.io, and I felt that it was super necessary to do a postmortem - mostly as a way to chronicle the ups and downs of making the game.

It’s also the first time I’ve sat down to do this, so pardon the rambling and wordiness which might ensue. It might also become a light “making of” feature.

Who the Hell is Pippin Barr?

My involvement in the Pippin Barr GAME IDEA Game Jam was a bit of a lucky happening. To be completely honest, I didn’t know much about the titular human behind the jam. Besides the occasional tweets of wacky game ideas that would float by my feed (retweeted by other people), that was it.

Barr is a developer whose work is by all means the pinnacle of absolute weirdness in interactive media, from games to words to photos. The jam honors that by pushing the participants to take one of his game ideas and create a game. Whether it’s “YOU ARE LITERALLY A BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER” or “IT’S JENGA BUT YOU SEE DEAD PEOPLE”, the end result of what it means to you should be expressed in the game you create.

Honestly, if you’d like to use his ideas, I highly suggest looking at the game idea archive on his website.

The game idea which seemingly spoke to me the most was “THERE IS NOTHING BUT YOU AND YOUR AK-47 AND MOUNTAINS OF FRESHLY CUT FLOWERS” - almost immediately, you can understand where dbfa takes its inspiration from in that line. In fact, I loved that line so much that it became the game’s tagline whenever I needed an easy description or way to pitch the game to people.

In a sense, the game went for a literal exposition of the idea - there is nothing but you (the player) and your AK-47 (the weapon of choice), and mountains of freshly-cut flowers (the enemies). Everything that I wanted the game to be almost immediately clicked into place, but the bulk of the work wasn’t done yet. And I didn’t have enough time.

Time is Never On Your Side

#GameIdeaJam started on the 7th of October.

The game’s development started on the 11th.

#GameIdeaJam ends on the 16th of October.

No pressure, right?

If there was anything that was a constant with myself and game jams, it would be time management. I would almost always be at odds with the time because I had other things to do, or I was simply goofing off. Or sleeping. Despite those setbacks, a game would be made.

For this project, a lot of its DNA can be attributed to a past project of mine - a game called Writer’s Block, which I made for my Creative Media Portfolio II class during the summer of 2015. It’s not the best game in the world, but it does capture a snapshot of how I felt at the time. It wasn’t the best summer I could’ve hoped for (at least initially), and I was in a pretty washed up state as a creator. Any other projects were torpedoed because I had no inspiration to see them through, or I felt that they weren’t really gonna be good projects.

WB was a weird kind of shooter where controls were restricted to the home keys - y’know, that thing Mavis Beacon taught you in that program about how to be a better typist? That was a deliberate choice, to mimic the author character who was writing a novel. The player presses one of the home keys to position a turret and fire at bad influences (represented by skulls), while you let through ideas and such. The game’s ending would depend on how well the player performed, and that was basically it.

The framework of the game was a crash course in Construct 2′s pathfinding behaviors which could be attached to objects - making a sort of rudimentary AI which only needed a beacon to attach itself to. death by flower arrangement was an evolution of that, expanding the playing from narrow hallways to a wide open area and designating the player character as a moving beacon that they would consistently pursue as they defended themselves.

This video from my Facebook page showed how the base of the game ran - everything was all squares, and ran quite smoothly. I was also testing movement with ESDF, rather than WASD - which would be an issue later on. The spawn objects were placed off-screen, generating enemies every so often. In fact, the spawning of enemies would prove to be one of the more difficult things about developing the game. It needed constant tweaking, and sometimes, I got really frustrated with how janky it was. At this point in time, I was glad to have a solid base to work with, and making a “look” for the game followed suit.

Pixel Art for Novices

If there is one thing that I do want to teach myself, it’s pixel art. I love it a lot, and I’ve always been fascinated with artists who are masters of the craft. Admittedly, things take time and most times when I’ve tried my hand at it, I didn’t really get very far. That being said, it wasn’t very different with this game as I would have to apply whatever bits and piece I had learned in order to get by.

The first thing I designed were the flowers. Rather than make them tiny little nuggets, they were a bit larger than the player character. You can also see that they’re not particularly menacing - it was an initial idea that I had, but decided against since I would rather keep it simple than complicate the design any more than it should’ve been.

This video was the first time the original red flower asset was implemented - along with a little tiled background to represent the grass. Also introduced were after effects of killing the flowers - a patch of petals which they drop after being defeated. It was a lot larger (and noticeably square) in this video, but that would also be tweaked in order to fit in naturally. There still wasn’t a character in place of the controlled square which fired square bullets at the now-flowers.

The little story of the florist began around the time when I made the art for the flower, as I felt it would need a bit of story to explain why such a game was even happening. It easily became the adventure of a florist named Flanigan who took a trip to the mountains to gather flowers for her shop. Her AK-47 was a tool for both harvesting these special flowers and defending herself, so the game acted as a peek into what she does for a living.

Flanigan’s sprite took ages. I couldn’t for the life of me animate a top-down sprite of a person, despite many attempts to ape games like Contra and their style. With time not being on my side, I opted for a simple avatar of how I imagined her in my head - black girl with blue hair adorned with a red flower, up in a ponytail, wearing a pink shirt and blue skirt, holding an AK-47. I kinda look back at the design as a clusterfuck of whatever was swirling around in my head, but it is distinctively her look.

It All Comes Together

Project #dbfa, as it was called, was getting closer and closer to being feature complete or at least, as feature complete as it could be.

The last gameplay video I released online was as close to version 1.0 as possible - the purple square became Flanigan, the flowers were slightly redesigned and had palette swaps, the petals were brought in line, and for a dash of visual flair, killing them would activate a particle effect of petals spurting out. Flanigan’s AK-47 had actual AK-47 sounds (thanks to royalty-free SFX floating around the web) and bullets. And at the end, there was a screencap of the battlefield with petals of different colors strewn all about, a nice tease of the screenshot function I added in.

Though the object of the game was to survive the waves of endlessly spawning flowers, I added in the screenshot function as a way to appreciate the aftermath of the game rather than giving players the choice to immediately restart or booting them back to the main menu.

Further tweaks were made over the next two days since the video was out - pacing the spawn times for the flowers, finding appropriate music, working on the non-game bits like menus, crushing bugs that cropped up (like flowers being stuck and not moving at all), and also working on a logo for the game.

Finally, a mere 39 minutes and 23 seconds before the deadline on October 16th, I put the game out there for all to play. Playable in a browser, and also with desktop versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux through NW.js exports.

A day later, I uploaded a little trailer I put together with my gameplay. From there, it was waiting, watching, playing the other #GameIdeaJam entries, and being somewhat worried that it wouldn’t be played at all.

I decided to share the game on Reddit - most notably on the /r/WebGames and /r/playmygame subreddits in hopes of getting more eyes on the game. The responses soon after would prove to be rather valuable and eye-opening.

Nothing’s Ever Right on the First Try

Way too easy. The character can be practically invincible if you do this. Flowers don’t spawn here, so it’s basically a safe haven. Why ESDF? No scoring system? Controls can be frustrating. Too much blinking. Can’t tell where the character is facing. Maybe add in customizable controls?

If you’re wondering, that’s not all from the same person. Thankfully, people played the game. But as expected, they had their own take on how it worked and what could be done to make it better.

Then you’ll probably wonder “didn’t anyone else besides you test the game?”

The answer is a flat no.

Not because I didn’t want to, but rather, I was in isolation at that point in my life - I had friends, yes, but I didn’t have a chance to hang out and do much. And before you ask about online friends, I didn’t really speak much to them either. I had no time for testing, and so the game was basically pushed out the door with barely any QA besides what I could see.

The game was cute to some, a bore to others, and an unpolished product to basically everyone. I was’t going to be defensive of the game, or hope for cushy comments that don’t help with the game getting better. Not to say that I didn’t accept any praises, but I did want the game to be a nice experience for players.

I played other entries in the #GameIdeaJam - some of which I felt were beyond amazing. The game idea I took on was done by another developer, and it was wildly different from my own: no enemies, no interactions. I thought it was really cool, and in contrast to dbfa, a lot more calmer.

The ratings didn’t really matter (releasing a game was an automatic win), though with whatever ratings I could muster up, the game was 38th overall, with scores hovering around a 3 out of 5 range. Indie games gal Jupiter Hadley covered it in her ALL THE INDIE GAMES series on the jam (Part 2, to be exact) - which was honestly a nice goal for me, since I missed out on being featured in a past vid for a different game in a different jam due to a faulty executable.

And so, another game was made and it was on the next one… or so I thought.

A Real Fixer-Upper

It is true that I basically ignored the game for the rest of the year, but version 1.1 was going to happen regardless. I just needed a definitive list of what went wrong, and what needed to be right. Reddit user Qu4Z basically mapped out all of what version 1.1 would become in a comment that was sent to me via a comment in the /r/NintendoSwitchIndie subreddit.

They were very polite with bringing up their findings, and I had a decent chat with them about the things which went wrong overall. For ease of access, this was mostly my response to their questions and concerns.

ESDF was not a great move for me. I think it stayed was due to something I read about WASD vs. ESDF, but I do want to revert to WASD in version 1.1 of the game.



I actually meant to use clickable buttons for better menu navigation, but to be completely honest, I lazed around with the non-game parts. Normally, I do take my time, but I rushed through that part to make the deadline.



I thought there were particle effects for the energy drinks, but I will alter that to be more visible.



I think I stuck to just four for time’s sake. I think my initial idea was for three types of flowers (a set of four), with four color variations. There was only one set for the jam version. Someone had brought up the idea of objectives, though you were right about it trying to be meditative.



The petal scatter for each flower was actually supposed to spawn at a certain position adjacent to it (north, south, west, east). Once players would pick up on that, maybe they would try to conserve certain flowers, while getting rid of others. I considered the idea of removing flowers without their petals being sprayed, but it wasn’t properly fleshed out.



Yeah, there is no real reason to stop firing, is there. I definitely wanted to get a health system going, though I ran into logic problems. Bear with me, I hadn’t touched Construct 2 in a few months, and I momentarily felt like a noob. I also wanted to have varying health among different flower types.



Spawners were such a pain during development. I normally position them off-screen, but for some reason, flowers would get stuck in certain positions, which is why I brought them on-screen though they are invisible to the player. The energy drinks used the same spawner, which is why some flowers would spawn over it, and the player would definitely collide with the hidden spawners. I really like the idea for the animation.



There’s definitely a lot more juice that I can probably add to the game. Again, I read up on how to improve feedback to players as they play, and it is very handy. Those kind of improvements would definitely help.



I think there’s a small wait period before flowers de-spawn after they’re hit, which may lead to that pop-in effect (which is actually a flashing effect to signify that they took a hit).



Okay, that was my fault for making it 99MB: the Windows ZIP file contains both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. I don’t think the NW.js export should add that much bulk to it, but then again, the Mac version is just one file and that’s 116MB. I’ll blame the audio for now.



Yeah, I wanted to alter that text color - I wanted to opt for a white text with black border, since that would be easily legible for some. I will consider the idea you put forward.



It felt great to have a head-on clash with the issues plaguing version 1.0, and making version 1.1 was gonna be a breeze! Then… I didn’t do anything for two months.

Having that much time away for gamedev was good, but I did wish that I had a chance to get started on a few minor things right away.

New Year, New Game+

One of my resolutions for the New Year was to get started on version 1.1 when I had the free time. It probably wouldn’t be a spectacle like it was during the #GameIdeaJam (barely any in-progress vids or devlogs), but I already knew what had to be done.

Between January and April, I worked on the game on and off, until I felt it was ready for release.

With Qu4Z′s list on a separate window (in checklist form now), I began chipping away at the game. Some of the notable fixes were as follows:

Movement is now down with WASD.



I really regret the bad first impression I got with using ESDF to move. Never again, I say.

I completely revamped how flowers spawned by removing the static spawn areas, and instead using random numbers to generate X and Y positions for the spawners to appear (invisible to players) and spawn flowers. I also added a marker to show where they would spawn.



This was a great fix, as it fixed the bugged out flowers being stuck and it would make the flower spawns a lot less predictable. The markers would seem to defeat that purpose, but it was mostly so that players would see it and avoid overlapping it. A nice fix for those who pointed out how flowers spawned on the player character.

Flowers now had health, and would no longer die instantly.



Hello, game difficulty! Goodbye easy mode! I didn’t actually display the health of the flowers, but they were working fine under the hood - just to give the flowers a bit of a buff to their strength. Think of it like how Monster Hunter never reveals the health bar of monsters you fight. The only difference here is that you can’t tell when it’s close to death, like in MH.

Flanigan’s AK-47 would no longer have an infinite cache of ammo. They were limited to 30-round clips, along with a generous surplus, with ammo pickups being dropped over the course of gameplay.

Again, another good fix which allowed for the game difficulty to actually exist. In the beginning, you really could just hold down the left mouse button and mow down everything. Now, you have to manage how much ammo you had, and reduce wildly firing at the flowers like before.

This was also THE hardest fix to implement, solely based on the fact that I wanted to reflect this in the UI like how guns have their current load vs. how many bullets you had. The math was insufferable, and I had to break it down on paper, then bake it into the events system and tweak, tweak, tweak until I got it right. It was perhaps one of my favorite victories as a gamedev, and I felt really proud of pulling it together.

More music in the playlist, as well as a way to randomize what track played.



While not an exact complaint, having only one song in the game which didn’t loop naturally was awful. I fixed this by adding new songs which fit the “flower” motif. A bunch of these were future funk tracks sourced from YouTube and Soundcloud from artists who were pretty great to listen to. My only criteria was that it had to feel like the kind of music you would want to hear while playing the game, and surely enough, they fit the bill. The inclusion of music was also a callback to an older game, Battery-Powered Drift, which I made as a “mixtape game” - putting in great eurobeat songs to play along with in a game that reminded me heavily of Initial D. One of the artists I featured liked the game, and I got to meet them in 2015 at a convention.

Back to the gamedev, the randomization was an offshoot from the new spawn behaviors - only that they were scaled back considerably to work with audio tracks. It took a while to work correctly, but it was definitely worth it.

Revamping the menu, and adding a how-to-play pre-game screen.



One of the better quality-of-life upgrades to the game was adding a section before the game that taught players the controls and what certain things did. Initially, the control scheme of the game was all over the place and it was really sloppy. Thankfully, I was able to scale back on the amount of buttons needed, and kept it way more simple.

—

Of course, that’s only the really major changes. The full version 1.1 changelog is on the game’s itch.io page, which was a blast to write since I rarely ever did something like that.

So, with an extra 4 months of work (or rather certain weeks of work spread out within 4 months) compared to just 6 days for the initial version 1.0 game jam version, version 1.1 was finished and ready to go.

Version 1.1

Version 1.1 of death by flower arrangement landed on April 19, 2017 to as much fanfare as I could’ve hoped to attain.

In addition to its updated release on itch.io and the NW.js desktop versions for Windows/Mac/Linux, the game also saw release for the first time on Game Jolt.

I tried again to post it on Reddit, but my 15 minutes with the game had already passed. I was able to contact Qu4Z, and send them the updated version as promised. They responded (in great detail), though I sadly haven’t had the time to chat. Hopefully, I can open up dialogue against with this postmortem if I’m lucky. What I do remember from their message was basically how the game went from an unpolished dud to an addictive little endeavor. Nitpicks aside, it was a great update and I couldn’t be any more happier with the progress made on it.

Over time, I expanded the game’s release to two more platforms: Newgrounds (which was a fun time for me as a former NG junkie who never uploaded content), and the Scirra Arcade (which was a pain because I had to abide by a file size limit).

Post-dbfa

So, now what? I don’t know. I missed two game jams that I really wanted to participate in, and I’ve been out of the game for a while now. That isn’t to say that I can only make games for jams, but I have been meaning to hash out a new concept as soon as I can and actively work on small-scale games in order to improve my portfolio.

If there’s anything that I’ve learned from my time with version 1.1, it’s that there’s always time for gamedev. Not during Ludum Dare, or some other jam. I’ve also learned a lot about using constructive criticism to my advantage, the need to reach out to people to help me test my game, and also realizing that the things I’ve worked on in the past will always return in a new form - whether it’s applying similar mechanics, reusing code, or causing an unintentional throwback to happen.

But perhaps the best thing I learned in this cycle is finding closure with a game. There are some games/projects which I’ve hung on to for way too long, and others which I’ve straight up abandoned. I think that dbfa has gone as far as it possibly could with my current skill set, and I’ve had a ton of fun exploring the possibilities of a potential version 1.2, but I really want to move on to the next project and leave Flanigan to her floral work.

Special Thanks

Thanks to everyone who helped me out with the game over the last year, whether directly or indirectly:

Pippin Barr - the namesake of the jam, and the game idea which led to the game’s creation



- Conor McCann - creator of the game jam



- Qu4Z - probably the main reason why version 1.1 even exists

- Bela Rios - my girlfriend who continually supports me on ventures like these

- Jupiter Hadley - for showing dbfa in her vid, made my entire day back then

- all the artists of the music I used - y’all are awesome, and your music is dope

- Construct 2 - the best gamedev tool ever which has allowed me to make games as a designer/artist

- my dad - I don’t really know if he knew about the game, but technically, if I wasn’t into games, this game wouldn’t be made – also, I miss you so much

- myself - for not being stubborn with critiques and making a kickass game in like 6 days

- friends - for being cool people and supporting my work in whatever ways possible

Until next time, friends.