First off, thanks to everyone who's checked out Flowerdrops so far! Considering this game was mostly developed as a challenge/experiment for myself, I did not really expect anyone to find it particularly fun or engaging. But the fact that some of you played every single level (and want more content on top of that) is extremely encouraging for me. I'm releasing a small patch today that addresses some bugs, but as for my plans for a bigger update, I think I'm going to go a bit farther with it and include some new levels & bonus content! So, look forward to that at some point.

Anyway, now for the main topic of this post! Like I said above, Flowerdrops was made as a bit of a challenge. I started working on it in mid-August, and decided on September 7th as my "deadline" to see if I could stick to a schedule and dedicate myself to finishing (or at least releasing) a project in the span of roughly 3 weeks. And, overall, I'd say I was pretty successful in doing that! I had to cut corners & make small sacrifices, but that was all part of the challenge, and I had a lot of fun with it. As someone who has always had a bad "feature creep" habit this was a big deal for me!

Early on, once I had the mechanics mostly solidified, I made the assumption that making levels for the systems I had designed would be easy and straightforward. Just plop some geometry into the Room Editor, place some flowers at semi-random, and that's all I'd need to make "fun enough" levels. I even tried making a level by simply drawing random shapes on paper and scanning it in (see the clip below!)

Once I added the Cloud as the spawning point for water drops, I quickly learned that it WAS really easy... that is, easy to make near-impossible, super frustrating levels! Some flowers would be harder to hit with water than necessary-- or in some cases, out of reach entirely. In many cases all I really needed to do was place the player's Cloud in a more optimal spot. Or in other cases, the difference between a "balanced" and "frustrating" level would come down to just moving a few flowers or pieces of geometry around. But even knowing that, the process of testing & balancing levels was extremely tedious and slow. 

So I created a simple utility for testing levels, aptly named "TEST MODE." All it does is spawns in a TON of droplets -- 1,080 of them, to be exact-- and draws information about them to a "heatmap" which then gets saved as an image. This instantly gives me a MUCH better idea of where water can travel in the level. I can also run multiple tests on levels with moving geometry or gravity/wind. Plus it's really fun to watch it do its thing!

I also have it visually distinguish between "regular" bounces and "first" bounces, as "first" bounces are what are usually shown by the player's Trajectory Preview. The color of the outlines go from green to red depending on the droplet's starting speed. The blue-white "foggy" parts represent all other bounces. This lets me get a lot more granular/specific when balancing levels. I quickly developed a process for balancing the level difficulty. As long as I was putting flowers in spots that were hit frequently and predictably enough, I was less likely to create frustrating levels. Sure, it wasn't a "no brainer" like I had originally expected, and I still had to do lots of iterating & testing before I was happy with any given level, but at least it wasn't totally daunting anymore! Though, there's definitely still plenty of balancing that can be done, so I plan to tackle much of that in an update.

As for that bigger update, not really sure when I'm going to begin work on that. Shortly after I released Flowerdrops I enrolled in a few classes and those have taken up most of my time. But I'll definitely share more details once I start. May even livestream development at some point if I feel up for it, or at least write a bit more in a dev log. We'll see! But for now, hope you enjoyed this little look behind the scenes. Until next time!