Flower (video Game) - Development

Development

Flower was developed as a spiritual successor to Flow, a 2006 Flash game created by Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark while the two were students at the University of Southern California. Flow was later developed into a PlayStation 3 game by Thatgamecompany in 2007 and a PlayStation Portable game by SuperVillain Studios in 2008. Flower was Thatgamecompany's "first game outside the safety net of academia". It was first announced at the Tokyo Game Show on September 24, 2007, and was released on the PlayStation Network on February 12, 2009. Flower was intended primarily to provoke positive emotions in the player, and to act as "an emotional shelter". Six to nine people were involved at varying stages of development. Chen, who co-founded Thatgamecompany with game producer Kellee Santiago, was the creative director in charge of the game, while Clark was the lead designer. Chen described the game as "an interactive poem exploring the tension between urban and nature". He decided on the "nature" theme early in the development process, saying that he "had this concept that every PlayStation is like a portal in your living room, it leads you to somewhere else. I thought; wouldn't it be nice if it was a portal that would allow you to be embraced by nature".

Before beginning work, the development team commissioned two pieces of music that they felt would inspire the right emotional tone for the game to guide their efforts. They created a number of prototypes, including concepts focused on growing flowers and based around human consciousness. The team decided that a prototype centered on petals floating in the wind best captured the emotions they wanted to evoke. They made keeping the player in a peaceful emotional state their design focus, and removed elements that frustrated players such as petal collection requirements to unlock levels and game mechanics that were too traditional and made the players too excited. The team tried to not place any barriers in the levels, allowing the player to go anywhere in an open world, but realized that without a few guidelines, such as the camera focusing on new flowers or segmenting the levels, players became confused and frustrated. Chen described the process as "almost like we wanted to throw away the traditional game design, but we end up picking up all the pieces we threw away and putting them back because we know those are actually needed to deliver a good guided experience". The overall development time was two years, but the team spent three-fourths of that time in the prototyping stage. After deciding on the game elements, Flower was produced in only six months.

The game's focus on emotions was sparked by Chen, who felt that the primary purpose of entertainment products like video games was the feelings that they evoked in the audience, and that the emotional range of most games was very limited. Chen tried to make the game focus more on emotions than on a message; he specifically changed the design of Flower when early testers felt there was a message of promoting green energy in the game. To make Flower have the "emotional spectrum" that he wanted, Chen looked at the development process as creating a work of art, rather than a "fun" game, which would not provoke the desired emotions. He summarized this view by saying that the only gameplay mechanic is hitting a flower to trigger a new event. The team specifically cut out deeper gameplay elements because these would have added "challenge" to the game, which, while fun, would not have been relaxing.