petalsadrift-blog

[petalsadrift-blog]

Hello friends!

Today, I felt like sharing a little bit about how I go about making a level for this game. But first, here’s a screenshot - I swear there’s progress! 

This is my favorite little area in the game so far! I am especially proud of myself for making the water (it animates!). Since the artists are no longer tied to the game, it’s up to me to fill in any missing assets. Talk about pressure.

Anyways, on to the levels! For this demo, I’m putting together five levels. They’re all fairly small, but the level size just felt right for this type of game.

Step 1

I write down a list of everything that I can include in a level. I usually use a spreadsheet:

Some of these did not make the cut. And that’s cool. I tend to write down a lot of things that won’t necessarily work for the game, but I generally only see that as a positive.

Step 2

Figure out what will appear in your level. With such a small number of levels, I decided to try and introduce two new things in each level. The spreadsheet makes this pretty easy too. Here’s a very outdated example:

All of those BPMs are super super crazy fast. I think the highest used in the demo is 115. 

Step 3

Get some graph paper and doodle! I started out by drawing five rectangles of varying sizes and then filling them in.

Spoilers. Here’s a peek at my game dev notebook:

Level One is located on the bottom page in the top left. Once I like it enough, I redraw it on my favorite paper.

I try and detail any new or important encounters in this refined draft.   

Step 4

Build it! Put it together and see if it works. Here’s a .gif of the first level. Good thing I left the raycasts visible, because I think I spot something wonky with one of the moving walls. 

Step 5

Playtest it. Then modify and playtest in a loop for all eternity!

And that’s how I approached the creation of the demo levels! Since it’s probably more interesting to know my thought process behind the level’s composition, here’s a level breakdown.

Level Breakdown:

When introducing something new, I like to give the player a lot of space to kind of play with it and learn how to interact with it. Since the beat-matching mechanic can take a little while to get used to, I blocked out a huge area of open space right at the beginning of the level.

Next, the player encounters moving walls. I wanted the player to be able to see the moving walls before reaching them, so I forced a longer approach. With a little gap between the first occurrence and the second, the player has time to recover. The level’s first checkpoint is before the moving walls and the second is located right after.

The instinct is probably to rush through the next two, but wait! There’s a petal, so you might have to backtrack to get it. If you make it to the end of the level and missed this petal, you’ll be able to see it through the wall behind the level exit portal.

The next area has a very simple musical puzzle. When the player moves over one of the birds, it plays a note and gives a small visual clue. The goal is to tap the birds in ascending order. Once the puzzle is complete, the grayed out petal nearby becomes collectible and the dirt/rock tile blocking the path is destroyed.

Once you continue on the path, you’ll see a petal on your left that you can’t get to and what may look like a dead end. But the level has to go somewhere and you probably remember all the stuff on the left, soooooo SCREEN WRAP!

Checkpoint. You’ll hopefully remember the petal you just saw and collect it on the far right of this area. And then you’ll come across this terrible rock thing and of course there is a petal in the center.

Once you get that, the only way to go is up to the level exit portal.

End level.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for you today. All five levels have been built and are undergoing some polish. I should hopefully have a build up for you soon! Thanks for tuning in :)

Love, Iman

[petalsadrift-blog]

Update!

Hello friends,

It has been way too long since we’ve posted an update, but we feel like a late update is better than no update, so here we are! 

While we had hoped to release our game in June, we both got caught up in other projects. I was off working on Brosaurus Wrecks! VR and Jun was working on CtrlShift VR. The two projects took up most of our lives for the past few months, and so our progress on Petals Adrift has been a bit slow. 

We also just graduated with our Master’s degrees in Games & Playable Media from UCSC! Woo! We are both super happy to have made it through the year, however, that means that the fate of this game was up in the air. After discussing it, we decided that I would continue to develop the game, while Jun pursues other projects. 

I’ll be working on Petals Adrift part-time from now on, and I hope to have a small demo for you all soon! Until then, here’s a recent look at the game! 

Love, Iman

[petalsadrift-blog]

Vertical Slice

Hi friends!

Great news - we made it through our Vertical Slice presentation! It was an incredibly nerve-wracking experience, watching our games get played and judged by industry professionals, but we made it and we couldn’t feel more proud! 

While Jun and I have greatly enjoyed making the game, we decided to scale it down significantly to just a few small levels. We will release the game on our website in June of this year! 

Thanks for following us on our journey!

Love, Iman & Jun

[petalsadrift-blog]

Always nice to look up and see some beautiful concept art! #indie #indiegame #indiegamedev #gamedev #gamedeveloper #gamedevelopment  #gamedesign #gamedesigner #videogames #games #gamer #art #artist #2d #2dart #conceptart #contrast #digitalart #digitalpainting #ucsc #ucscgpm

[petalsadrift-blog]

Hello everyone!

We’re getting very close to our Vertical Slice deadline and we are on a sprint to the finish line! We got our final music assets from our composer Rico, our SFX from Daniel, and all of our art in the game - now it’s just a matter of tying everything together in code. Here’s a snapshot of what our game will look like for Vertical Slice:

The most important thing we’ve done this week is playtest our little nugget of a game. While it’s still in a very early phase, we’ve been receiving a lot of very important feedback on the game. The thing about playtesting is, we, as the design team, know exactly how our game is meant to be played. And we get infinite chances to practice our skills throughout the development process. Any other player will not have the insider knowledge that we have, making their decisions unpredictable and enlightening.

Aside from our friends, we were lucky enough to have our game playtested by Brian Allgeier (Insomniac Games)! We learned a lot through all of the playtesting and decided that we needed to make some design changes stat. While it’s often hard to depart from a design choice, sometimes change is necessary to elevate a game to the next level.

Our main design change was that the main character is no longer in constant movement, rather, the character only moves when the player presses a button on the beat. We found that people were not keen on moving without explicitly entering input, preferring to control exactly when and where the character moves. Once we made the change, the game immediately felt better! Thanks, playtesters!

We also realized, thanks to Brian, that our animations were throwing people off beat, since they weren’t perfectly aligned to the music. Rather that calculating out exact times for each frame, we decided to reduce the total frames, making the animations tie further into the lurching, grid-based movement.

As for what we’ve been doing this week, Jun has been continuing her work on perfecting the character movement. Due to our design changes, Jun has primarily been tweaking her code here and there and playtesting on repeat. We are currently using a Unity Plugin called Koreographer, which allows us to set code events directly on a music track, so Jun has also been busy setting up our music tracks. While it takes some time to implement, Jun has become a Koreographer ninja!

I’ve been working on coding some puzzles and obstacles, as well as coding collectable petals and unlocking music at certain points in the game. I’ve also been designing our beat visualization UI elements. For any kind of beat-matching game, the UI can make or break the game. People have varying levels of rhythm, and while it may be easy for one person to press controls on beat, it can be incredibly difficult for someone else. So in comes UI! We decided on a very simple element that will reside on one side of the screen. Stay tuned to see what that looks like!

That’s it for this week! We have a lot of work to do in the next week, so be sure to keep up on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

Love, Iman

[petalsadrift-blog]

How exactly does a bunch of sticky notes translate to a level in Unity? Like so! By color coding each square, it was a simple conversion to make. The colors also made it easier to balance what was in the level and where each object should be placed!

[petalsadrift-blog]

Well, it's #screenshotsaturday, so here's a glimpse at how our game looks today! Of course, the look and feel of the level continues to evolve during pre-production, so this may not be our final form! Let us know what you think!

[petalsadrift-blog]

This color comp by Karolyn Moses was one of the first art assets that we received and it is still one of our favorites! It decided the color palette for our game's vertical slice and continues to inspire us with its beauty

[petalsadrift-blog]

Hi friends!

We’ve got some great progress to share with you all today! First off - we got back from GDC this weekend and it was amazing! We all saw some great talks, met some wonderful people, and had an overall incredible time. We are more energized than ever and it’s been exciting trying to incorporate the things that we’ve learned!

Our game design has continued to evolve here and there, most noticeably with our main characters. They have been separated and you will now play as the solo butterfly. The flower will still be around - you just have to collect its petals for it! If you’re wondering what this butterfly will look like, here’s a rough animation from Julie!

We’re starting to receive some more artwork and we are pumped! Julie has animated the butterfly, as well as the mushrooms and she’s currently working on animating the remaining cast of characters. Janice has been giving us ground tiles, so we can build our gameplay environment. And, to pull everything together, Lydia has been working on creating our background, as well as plants and rocks. With everything coming together, our game is finally starting to feel like it’s ready for full-on production. Check out the picture below and let us know what you think! 

Having art in the game is making everything seem so much easier! It’s way more fun to work with things and test them out when they look so good.

Speaking of work, we’ve made some alterations to the game’s feel. Since the game is grid-based, we decided that the character’s movement was too smooth and just didn’t feel right. Jun was able to quickly convert her code and create a more lurching movement for the butterfly. This made a world of difference and felt way more natural for the game. We are still deciding on how we’d like to implement collisions, but for now, Jun has made it so that the character pulls a 180 when they run into walls. It’s looking great so far, and I can’t wait to see how the movement continues to evolve.

The most interesting and surprising change that occurred from altering the movement was how different the camera movement became. Since the camera was being set manually to the character’s position, it too hopped along to the beat. 

We found it a bit disorienting and decided to make the camera move more fluidly with the player. While Jun is still tweaking it to be exactly how we want it, switching up the camera’s movement made our game feel infinitely better. Check out the .GIF below to see what we're talking about! Great job, Jun!

While she’s been busy with character movement, I’ve been creating a number of design documents. Aside from updating our general design docs, I put together a Vertical Slice feature priority list. This has helped Jun and I decide where to spend time on the project and in what order. I’ve also been incorporating the art and animations into the game, as well as placing temporary sounds around the environment.

As far as puzzles go, I’ve implemented two so far! We currently have a puzzle that involves bouncing on turtles until they produce the same sound, as well as one that has you bouncing on mushrooms in a predetermined sequence that’s sung by a bird.Since the puzzles are somewhat similar, the code was easy to adapt between the puzzles, making my job easy. Since we’ve already got two of our puzzles implemented, we’ll be able to incorporate even more puzzles and environmental challenges in the coming week! Woot!

You know what would make all of this even better? If we had some music or sounds to use in our game. Oh wait! We do! Earlier this week, Kelsey set up a meeting and we finally met our sound team. We are working with two sound designers, one for SFX and one for music composition. The former is Daniel Helling, while the latter is a personal friend, Rico Frye. Rico has been DJing for as long as I’ve known him (he goes by 155 and is part of Dem Suckaz!) and we can’t wait to work with him.

I’ve envisioned a kind of old-school hip-hop soundtrack for the game, as I feel like it will provide some interesting contrast to all the flowers and butterflies! I wasn’t sure what type of music I wanted until I heard a sample track on the interwebs and immediately knew.

That’s it for now! We will continue updating you with our progress weekly, but if you want more frequent insights into our process, check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

Love, Iman & Friends

[petalsadrift-blog]

Helloooooo friends!

Hope you’ve all had an amazing week! We have some exciting updates for you - prepare yourself! For starters, we decided to move away from a traditional platformer and towards an airborne adventure, which means that our flower character will be fully dependent on the butterfly for movement (you’ll never tear them apart!). Thanks Kelsey, for helping us organize our designs and pushing me to make some final creative decisions!

Jun is incredible and was able to knock out the code for the butterfly mechanic in just a few days! In our game’s current state, the butterfly successfully flies around the screen, changing direction in response to the flower’s singing on beat (don’t worry, we’re working on names for these two bffs <3). Since we’re going for a more fast-paced adventure, it’s important for us to make it very visually clear to the player when the beat occurs (a great example of how a game does this is Crypt of the Necrodancer!). We currently have the equivalent of graph paper as the background of our game, but we’re working on ways to tastefully incorporate a grid system into the game.

Since Jun is extra speedy, she is now working on creating a diving feature for our butterfly/flower friends. In order to bounce on something, the butterfly will fold up her wings and the two will accelerate downwards. Once they bounce on, say, a mushroom, they will be propelled back upwards. She’s also working on the duo’s collision with walls - if a butterfly & a flower run into a tree when no one is around, do they make a sound? In this game, the answer is always yes! Really though, when the two collide with other objects, they’ll be knocked down a certain distance and must recover before continuing on.

Anyways, my primary focus this week has been on level design. As someone who loves exploring every little aspect of a level (I will no joke smash everything I can in a level for the chance at a rupee), I’m excited about creating levels that require the player to move through every nook and cranny and maintain some spacial memory of how each level is constructed.  To do this, we decided that we wanted our levels to be vast and vertical, as well as having some wrap-around walls (meaning that you can leave the far right side of the level and pop out on the far left side). 

I’ve also been working on creating design documents for both the development team and the art team to reference. These documents range from detailing specific mechanics, such as how the mechanics will actually work, to more general concepts, such as the flower’s evolution throughout the game. Since things change here and there through implementation and playtesting, these documents are constantly updated. This keeps everyone on the same page, which can be quite tough in pre-production! While I’m currently updating our documents to the current specs, here’s a look at how I like to structure them!

As for game visuals, our artists are continuing to produce some seriously beautiful art! We decided that we wanted all the characters in the game to have some relation to music and the artists came up with great interpretations of the concept. The character sheet below was done by Karolyn and, while we honestly adore all of these little birds, we decided that we wanted to see more characters in the style of the bird circled.

Julie has also been working on creating characters and she came up with a number of lovely critters that would  fit well into our game. We worked with her to narrow down our favorites - you can see them circled below! Aren’t they adorable?

Make sure to take a close look at that butterfly, since she’s one of the game’s main characters! We’ll be receiving some more refined characters next week, so don’t miss it!

As for our other artists, Lydia has been working on sketching backgrounds, as well as creating environmental assets for our levels. Check out some of the plants she drew this week! We can’t wait to start dropping these into the game!

Janice has been playing with color comps, determining how to make the gameplay layer pop out against the backgrounds. This is something that is easy to overlook, but it’s incredibly important! If the player doesn’t can’t differentiate between what is important and what is purely aesthetic, confusion and frustration are quick to appear. Thankfully, our artists have a great eye for color! Here’s a look at one of her concepts - we knew it was a match made in heaven when we saw her little mushrooms!

With our vision more clearly defined for our vertical slice, we should have some game-ready art assets by next week. We couldn’t be happier with our game’s look and we love how the art style plays into the game’s quirky concept.  

Our next step is incorporating music! You may be surprised to hear this, but my biggest musical inspirations for this game were all things Reggie Watts (he is a musical genius, just sayin’) and...Potter Puppet Pals - The Mysterious Ticking Noise (check it out on YouTube). While these things are so incredibly different, they’re also very closely tied by the looping structures employed. I really like the idea of starting a level off fairly quiet and allowing the player to build the song as they progress. Naturally, this means I started my week off by sitting alone in a room, recording myself making “beats” (though really, I might be the only one who would classify them as such). However, after (sadly) very little deliberation, we decided that we would move forward with a more musical route. So, as the player collects petals, they will unlock parts of the songs. Depending on how the player navigates the level, the song will be composed differently on each playthrough!

On that note, it’s time for me to get back to work! Thanks for tuning in! We hope you enjoyed this post and that you learned something new! For more frequent updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and/or Facebook! As always, feel free to contact us :)

Love,

Iman & the team

[petalsadrift-blog]

Anyone into level design? I'm @imanfayek and I'm the Creative Director for the project. I've been working on crafting some challenging levels for the game and, since it's grid-based, I thought sticky notes would be a perfect way to visualize each scene! This is the level that we're building for our vertical slice presentation. If you can't tell from the height of the sticky notes, I'm pretty short! For more info, check out our website! Link in profile or www.petalsadrift.com🌼

[petalsadrift-blog]

Hello friends! This concept art was created by one of our SJSU artists, Julie Huang. They have a fantastic eye for color, making this game a breeze to gaze at for hours on end 😍 To learn more about our game and the team, check out our website! Link in profile for www.petalsadrift.com 🌼

[petalsadrift-blog]

Hello Hello!

Hi friends!

Welcome to the development blog for Petals Adrift! We are a crew of three ladies (the future is female!), working in Unity to craft this gem just for you <3

In this musical puzzle-platformer, you’ll play as a lovable flower spirit in a colorful, yet mysterious forest, who solves environmental puzzles by singing to her heart’s content. On a quest to collect her missing petals, you’ll explore a vast and charming level, riding on butterflies and guiding their flight through song. You’ll also get a chance to bounce on musical mushrooms! We’d share more details, but who doesn’t love a little suspense?

 This game is about pure joy and the excitement that comes with creating something unique and special. We are currently in pre-production, which is the chaotic phase of exploration and experimentation, where we discover what makes our game different and, most importantly, fun. If we can make you smile, then we know we’re doing our job!

 My name is Iman Fayek and I’m the Creative Director, which means I come up with wonky ideas and then translate them into something playable. I’ll also be keeping you updated on our process, so that you can experience this journey with us! I find that I learn a lot through devlogs, so I hope to return the favor to anyone looking for some inspiration.

Zejun Yuan (Jun) plays two roles on our team: Technical Director and Development Director. As the former, Jun leads the charge on programming, setting up our workflow (we use Git!), and keeping me in check with what is possible and what is too far-fetched. As the latter, Jun makes sure we stay organized and manages our artists and sound designers.

Kelsey Coffman is our Producer. She makes sure we maintain a steady workflow and, more importantly, ensures that we keep our eyes on the prize - the final product. She reins us in when we get lost in the matrix and keeps us on task.

Now that you know who we are, it’s time to update you on our progress! We started the week by nailing down our core mechanics, as well as the setting and theme of our game. We also narrowed our character’s core abilities to a select few, with singing at the forefront of our choices. Why singing, you ask? Aside from the fact that I am always singing (or is it really just yelling?) impromptu songs, music is something that has the power to alter my mood in any which way. I wanted to create a game that makes the player feel happy and warm inside - and what better way to accomplish that than with whimsical characters that can sing weird and beautiful songs?

 Anyways, Kelsey has pushed us to determine what a vertical slice of our game would look like. What on earth is a vertical slice? The best description I’ve heard is from Erin Robinson-Swink (Gravity Ghost), who explains it as such: imagine that you have a cake and that you’re interested in tasting this cake. Rather than eating the whole thing (hey, I’m not telling you how to live - you do you), you take a “vertical slice” and from that single slice, you’re able to gather what the entire cake will taste like. This general idea can be applied to a game (pls don’t start eating your games). When we create a demo, we must include enough features to paint a picture in the player’s mind about what the final game will look and feel like. For now, we’ve decided that our vertical slice will take the player through one of our main puzzles and some environmental challenges.

 Jun has been hard at work making our little butterfly (though at this point, it may or may not be a square) fly along to the main character’s singing. In order to make the gameplay more challenging, she has been puzzling out beat-matching and how to tie that in with the player’s keypresses. Since the character must sing on beat to change the butterfly’s direction, the task is being tackled in bite-sized chunks. She’s already making good progress and we hope to share a screenshot (or dare I say .GIF?) with you all next week!

 As for me, I’ve been working on the main character’s movement script. With some initial guidance from Steve Swink (Scale, author of Game Feel), I’ve been working on improving the game feel, making the character movement reminiscent of how a character like Mario traverses through his world. Our main character can now walk, jump, double jump, glide, and sing! Woot! I’ve also been hard at work refining the design of our game, taking input from the team, and then repeating the process until it feels just right. I’ll be sure to let you peek at my dev journal here and there, so that you can see just how I go about designing and refining.

As for art, we are lucky to be working with four badass ladies from San Jose State University. Lydia Valdez is our art lead, and she specializes in visual development and illustration. At this stage, she’s producing concept art and digitally painted backgrounds to use in-game. Check out one of her concepts below! <3

  Janice Lee also specializes in visual development and illustration and has been working on color comps, as well as environmental assets, such as flowers and plants - pretty much all the things you’d find in a forest. You can see some of her plants below! I love them all, but these are my favs :)

 Julie Huang’s concentration is in both animation and illustration. She has been hard at work on character design, creating interesting and compelling silhouettes, as well as more refined designs. These are some of her early concepts – looking great so far, Julie!

 And last, but not least, is Karolyn Moses, who is skilled in character design and illustration. She’s been creating color comps for the game and has a great eye for color. You can see our two favorites below. Aren’t they beautiful?!

  It has been incredible watching our ideas come to life through their artwork and we can’t wait to continue sharing what they produce!

 Well, that’s it for now! We hope you enjoyed this first look into our game and we look forward to sharing more of our process, as well as snippets from the game. You can also find us on our website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram! Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or feedback - we’d love to hear from you :) Have a wonderful day/night!

 Love,

Iman & Team Flower Friends 4ever