Bent Spoon Games Blog

I was experimenting/learning Blender before I knew what kind of game I wanted to make. The first model I decided to make was a flower. Don’t ask me why, I don’t remember. Naturally, the next step was to make it open/close petals. After I got my program to load and animate the mesh, I’ve decided to make a game from it. Nothing fancy: grass, flowers, and butterflies. I just wanted a simple finished game, that I could then port from Windows to other operating systems. So, from the beginning the emphasis was on the technical problems, not so much design ones. I fit all the game rules on a single sheet of paper.

I keep calling Flora and Fauna a game, even though I don’t really think it is one. It seems like something Tale of Tales would make: an art game, which is to say, not quiet fully a game.  (It seems my game fits their “Being X, doing Y, in Z” template really well, even though I wasn’t going for it.) The problem with Flora and Fauna is that it lacks gameplay. You can only open/close/spread pollen as a flower and fly/pollinate as a butterfly. There are only two goals: keep growing as a flower for a certain amount of time, or make all the flowers the same color by spreading the pollen. I would say this is not enough gameplay to classify Flora and Fauna as a game.

I feel that every aspect of the game is self-explanatory, so I won’t try to explain any of the game design choices I made here, but if you have any questions, do post a comment.