The Emotional Flower

By Steve Wark

Kelee Santigo's design post-mortem on Flower.

The possibility of games providing an emotional experience may be denied by critics like Roger Ebert. However, Kellee Santiago, current Ebert debater and co-founder of thatgamecompany, took the audience on an emotional journey of their own for the final presentation of the 2009-2010 IGDA-Montreal season.

This wasn’t the journey of a seed floating peacefully on the wind in thatgamecompany’s indie PSN hit, Flower, but a more familiar tale of anxiety and iterative development. The development of Flower is its own emotional journey, which Kellee shared from concept to prototype to product in a broad post-mortem.

The early prototypes of Flower were designed to test the playability of the key experiences the designers wanted to target: a sense of emotional shelter, safety, peace and harmony. The designers aimed to motivate the players to experience love through the game.

The designers settled on a flower field as a setting for this game. They used the early prototypes to establish the player’s role in the flower field: were players to be the seeds, the plants, or the wind and sun that fostered their growth?

The audience watches demos of early versions of the game.

Kellee presented the original prototypes to the audience. In the first, players controlled the wind that blew petals on the field. In the second, players controlled the sunlight; if they focused it on the plant correctly, then the plant would flower unpredictably according to rules of procedurally generated content. This prototype was certainly creative, but not emotional.

In the third prototype, the player generated flowers directly in the field in a first-person view, but there was no sense of the player’s identity in the world. The fourth version – called the Golf version during internal discussions, had players launching seeds into the air, and then guiding them along wind currents toward other floating seeds. Later prototypes included experiments with music and interactive sounds effects, even incorporating more traditional video game elements, such as time limits and power-ups. These made Flower feel more like a game, but also elicited some swearing during playtesting – certainly the opposite of the peaceful intentions for the game!

The prototypes were developed in 1-2 week iterations, allowing the designers to experiment with game concepts and garner player feedback. This was also the most significantly stressful – yet necessary, part of the process. “How many of you have experienced anxiety in your development cycle?” Kellee asked at one point in the presentation. The audience laughed in response.

She described the iterative development as “a system of potential that changes based on unpredictable outputs…like surfing.” The team explored gameplay with each prototype, in order to execute their vision of the game, but also had to be willing to make mistakes and abandon unworkable directions. She called this “wandering in a sea of truth” and said that this wandering was only sustainable because thatgamecompany was very open in their communication of estimates and deliverables with their client, Sony Santa Monica.  Of course, if the client was not open to exploration, those iterations may have been seen as inefficient, and the production would have gone less smoothly.

More prosaically, Kellee described the iterative process as a Big List of features deemed necessary for the vision of the game, but which could be removed individually without sacrificing the integrity of what remained. In the case of Flower, the goal of expressing love as a gameplay emotion was abandoned when it was clear that there was no consensus between the studio and the publisher of what “love” meant, but this didn’t detract from the other emotions in the game.

The final lesson.

Kellee closed the presentation with the following advice: “Wandering is okay in every role in every project, until you die.” She also revealed that she had sent a PS3 pre-installed with a version of Flower to Roger Ebert’s home and was eagerly waiting to continue the debate of games as art.

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