In the before time, the long, long ago, Mark, Ricky and myself worked for a satellite studio of Eidos called Morpheme. The three of us (along with a bunch of other guys) worked on the side of the studio dealing with the then still-wet-behind-the-ears genre of Casual games, and our friends in Wimbledon were keen to see what we had lined up next.
The initial concept of what eventually became “Flora’s Fruit Farm” started off a a slightly more fantastical concept involving gnomes growing and collecting fruit from a dynamically sprouting tree, this game had the imaginative title of “Gnome Garden”.
After much concepting of mechanics and characters such as the marvellous Doctor Craddock, there was a general feeling that, from the perspective of a casual games audience, the roots of the game should be placed in the real world so that the players could identify with the main protagonist and the tasks. The growth/harvesting concept was still sound, and was being exploited in different ways in other titles such as Alice Greenfingers, but we still wanted something different and special to keep it from being a “me too” game. Enter Flora.
We’d toyed around with making the harvesting idea set purely in the real world, but the idea of having your lead character trolling up and down ladders or shinning up a tree seemed horribly fiddly and left the game in a weird state of spending more time with the animations than the actual activity. Just having Flora appear at the top of a ladder also got ruled out as it then looked like we’d just been lazy with the animation. We decided it was best for Flora to interact with the tree from ground level, so explored various possibilities including magic powers and enchanted helper birds and squirrels! Eventually we came up with the idea of magical gardening gloves and tricks which Flora can perform whilst wearing them. These not only solved our harvesting problem, but also removed any witch like attributes from our protagonist herself . Our aim was to keep our target audience in their comfort zone whilst still being able to use aspects of magic. We were thinking more along the lines of the subtle magic found in Bewitched and Chocolat, than full blown fantasy.
The tricks allowed us to transpire real life harvesting actions to the gloves, so instead of using secateurs to cut down fruit as we originally did, Flora performs the cut it out trick. This trick system also removed any negetive connotations we used to have of using bug spray as the bug off trick is pesticide free! Rather than the tricks being limitless, we created a fairy dust currency with each trick requiring a different type of dust to work. This allowed us to incorporate some some light resource management elements into the game.
The last trick to be decided was how Flora grows the tree. We wanted to stick to our plan of staying within our audience’s comfort zone and after some thought we came to the conclusion that singing to the tree seemed the most sensible. Afterall, lots of people sing to their plants to keep them healthy…don’t they?
So, now we had an uber cool programatic tree growing mechanic, a magic glove harvesting system and an ace resource management element, we needed to nail the time management design. This aspect of the game went through a variety of iterations. We had customers queueing from the side and from the top. We had them holding hands, automatically taking the fruit they wanted and also queueing in seperate queues based on their fruit preferences. We found the system which worked best was one where customers appear in a dedicated zone behind the fruit stalls and the player has to manually deliver them fruit. Rather than customers telling the player what they want in a thought bubble, we decided to use a memory based system, which added some variation to typical time management gameplay.
Although we’d decided against helper animals earlier on in the design process, we knew the player would like help down the line so we re-visted the enchanted animal idea. This resulted in the shiny, supersize and supershiny squirrels! Need I say more? We also added in some complexity in the guise of pesky birds (who peck down your fruit) and cheeky gophers (who steal fallen fruit – so yup, they do work in cahoots with the birds!). These animals incorporated some arcade action to the game as some side to side mouse action is required to swat them away!
Rather than a traditional linear game, we decided to give the player freedom to grow the trees they wanted, sell from the trees they wanted and purchase the land they wanted. We also added various other features such as a graph system to track progress, collectables and secret hidden events. Not to mention the tip of the day (an idea we thought of at the pub!) which had Mark and I trawling the net for interesting facts about pie and coconuts.
Our next step was to get some feedback. We were lucky enough to get Flora onto the Gamezebo Beta test programme. It was actually in the run up to beta that Eidos re-structured and Honeyslug was formed. Being the lovely people that we are, Flora’s development carried on. The online beta went ahead as we were keen to obtain genuine player feedback so we could finalise balancing and iron out any difficulty spikes. Thanks to ARG, our super cool tracking software, we were able to do this and collected data from approximately 500 players. The data ARG logged was extremely helpful as we could tell if and where people were getting stuck, the average amount of money players had at certain points and other various user behaviour patterns. We then used this data to tweak the game.
Just before the re-structuring we were inteviewed for a C4 Talent documentary based on the game. How cool is that?!
So there you have it. A run down of some of the processes we went through when desiging Flora’s Fruit Farm. For more information on the game and it’s features, check back on Friday.
In the midst of all the exciting stuff we’ve got coming up, there’s an endless stream of paperwork, video capturing, more paperwork, image manipulation, pricing, supplemental paperwork and swearing at volume as we attempt to compliance ourselves up with the various parties who need us to supply them with facts and blurb and whatnot. This is what make our games publishable, marketable and any other -able which means we get cash at some point down the line from our friendly publisher/distributor. All of this takes time and is the sort of mundane act which would drain the joy of life from Nat and Ricky, that’s is why people like me exist.
So if you haven’t been convinced about getting Ric Rococo: International Art Thief on the iPhone/iPod from my incessant badgering, perhaps a free to play single level will convince you. Go to the appstore and get 
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