Fioritura
A relaxing top-down puzzle game
University Capstone Project
Fioritura is a game prototype made by the third year students at UQAT (Bachelor’s in Video Game Art & Design). In this cute and challenging puzzle game, we help a garden keeper in his quest to save its workplace and find his life’s calling.
As part of our capstone project, students had two months to develop game prototypes, going from the initial brainstorm, to a pitch, a high level concept, and finally delivering a playable technical showcase.
At each stage of production, half of the projects were eleminated, and the students from the canceled projects were reassigned to one of the remaining games, whose teams doubled in size. Fioritura made it to the technical showcase, but the game wasn’t selected for the last stage: where the projects are fully developped and published on Steam.
My Roles as a Game Designer
– Working on the game’s story and integrating its narration in the gameplay.
– Implementation of the Euphoria Flower, a main mechanic of the game (Visual Scripting / Blueprints).
– Creation of a tool showing information to player when they get close to important objects.
– Help programmers and designers by proposing ways to implement features and solutions to bugs.
– Creating puzzles and level layouts.
Lumiflor in Action
All the puzzles in Fioritura are tied to the flower mechanic. Special flowers can be picked up by the guardian, and while a flower is in its head (pot), all the assets in the level change visuals to fit the theme of the active flower.
The Lumiflor was especially hard to implement, since that flower works in a unique way: Instead of affecting all assets in the level, Lumiflor only affects the assets within its aura (a golden dome). What makes this even more complex is that the Lumiflor is always active, wether its used by a player or in a flower pot on the ground.
Whenever a Lumifor Flower moves (when a player moves with the flower equipped or when a player pushes a flower pot containing a Lumiflor), the assets within the Lumiflor Aura change (some objects enter it, while others leave it), so I needed to develop a way to detect collisions and overlaps between the aura and every other asset of the level dynamically, while keeping the game performant.