Many thanks to all those who enjoyed playing Floe and told us so!

It’s just a bit of fun. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

It’s all part of Chillingo’s “12 Days of Christmas” promotion:

On the 3rd day of Christmas,  gets a seasonal update and has a special Holiday Sale price of $0.99! Help baby bear Flo navigate across the ice floes to find her mama in this thoughtful, intuitive, heart-warming puzzler that’s the perfect Christmas gift of fun!

Repton

The player moves the character, the character moves the blocks (or avoids them, in the case of Kurushi). The player feels kinaesthetically involved. It would be fair to say that in Repton, the player is Repton the protagonist (thanks Wikipedia for telling me the name of the protagonist!).

In Floe, the player / protagonist is not so coupled. The blocks move, but Flo does not move them. The blocks move by a mysterious force; at least, it probably seems mysterious to Flo. The way Flo moves is slightly indirect too.  The player causes a pulsating target to appear, that Flo clearly finds fascinating and feels compelled to move towards it whenever it appears. Even if she can’t.

90% of the mass of the floe is beneath the water. And yet the player can tilt it. About a point very near the surface. The player causes psycho-kinetic delusions in infant polar bears.

The player is god.

Since the launch of the iPhone, apps have been big, especially in the games sector, which has seen some sell like AAA titles. Major developers have added the iPhone to their list of available platforms for existing titles, as well as moved to develop unique titles just for it.

The feature is published exclusively on Gamasutra.com and can be read here.

I hope people find this article useful when producing audio for the iOS devices. Please send any additional thoughts. Enjoy!

PJ Belcher

PJ Belcher Pro Audio

Floe was pretty complete in late July 2010, and we were ready to self-publish in August, but we decided to work with Chillingo to bring Floe to a wider audience. They asked for a few changes, and what with those, Crystal integration, and Chillingo being acquired, it’s taken a while to get Floe on to the App Store. And in that time, it’s not Floe that has been keeping us busy!

No, we’re working with another studio on something big, and famous! We can’t yet tell you what it is, but you have heard of it, unless you’ve been living in a cave. It’s really fun to work on, involves things dear to our hearts, and we’ll tell you about it just as soon as we can. Prototypes and early milestones have already been delivered!

In the meantime, please play Floe, and tell people about it. We made Floe in our own time, without any funding, in true indie style.  We know it’s a good game, but every developer needs help to reach that critical mass of players and power us on to new and greater things. We need your support so we can develop new and original indie titles.

Thanks to all those who’ve told us how much they (and their children) love Floe!

Flo says hi

We’re absolutely delighted to announce that Floe has been released and is now available on the App Store!

Watch this blog for more news and reactions. (So far all reviews have been 5 stars, but I’m sure that can’t continue.) Meanwhile, please enjoy Floe!

I couldn’t resist posting this cute new image of Flo wearing a Christmas hat.

What will Flo be doing for the holidays, I wonder…

We’ll start at the prototype stage and work our way to the final product. Graphically the prototype looked like this:

This is what we might describe as “visually functional”. It’s a playable game at this stage, with the elements of the game rendered as very basic shapes with very basic textures. If you look carefully, you can see that certain visual problems have been overcome, such as how the walls and blocks and avatar stand out against the colour of the floor.

What follows are the steps we took to arrive at our final look for Floe.

We needed to find an art style for the game, and one way to begin is by visually enhancing the existing elements of the prototype.

In art-design there can be simple as well as complex relationships between forms, but we’re still at the “throw paint at the canvas” stage and experimentation is the way forward.

This is where the concepts and the game prototype start interacting. concepts are interesting, but the real rock ‘n’ roll happens when you see concepts brought to life in the actual game. For the first time, we see Flo. Flo is a blue bear caught in a maze of blue cubes. Flo doesn’t yet realise that she’s a Polar Bear, and she doesn’t realise where she is or what that green arrow means.

Some of the concept ideas, such as white cubes, are finding their way into the playable version of the game and its starting to change things.

Things, such as blocks, stop being just ‘coloured’ and start to gain some texture. This is clearly a blue bear in some kind of environment, possibly related to ice or coldness.

If you opened your fridge and saw a blue bear inside, just run. But honestly, you never know how you’ll react if faced with a real bear in your fridge so its best to just fall back on your training.

White cubes often float in a white void, but not everyone has experienced that. People on Earth will buy your game. Its important to realise this, so here is a blue bear on some kind of snowy floaty toast-like slab of pervasive blueness. Those white cube things can only be one thing. White Cubes.

This is the playable version of the game at a crucial moment in development, because the game’s camera angle has changed. It makes the game more readable as a 3D environment and that affects the gameplay in terms of difficulty.

We are getting close to the final look.

The floor colour needs to visually support the brightly coloured blocks. the blocks can become frozen, which also means that they turn whitish and would need to stand out against the floor. That means that the game floor can’t be white any more. To avoid this clash, the floor must be darker, which in turn becomes the catalyst for changing the colour of the Bear. The Bear still needs to stand out against the floor, right?

You can see how the look of the main gameplay elements can be just as important as the look of the avatar. When the visual look of every element starts working together, its echoes the harmony of nature, which some humans find pleasing.

We have a polar bear, and it’s possessed with an overly enlarged cranium so that on an iPhone, you can actually see its face without using two fingers to enlarge it and then dropping your phone in the bath, and then having to face the shame of getting it mended by a “genius”.

We’re very near the end now. Your patience is amazing, have you ever thought of becoming a videogame artist?

We have a baby female polar bear. That explains the giant head. Well, babies have heads that are in proportion to the rest of their body, although when I was born I also had a giant body. I weighed 11 pounds. People had to take turns carrying me. Anyway, studies indicate that female baby polar bears are awesome. This is Flo, she has an entire continent to cross and needs your help!

We start testing the game with a few close friends and family, and someone complains that artistically, it’s all a bit ‘blue’. We tend to agree, but instead of making the sea green or the floor pink or changing the bear into a monkey or introducing a mission based open-world and a first-person camera, we decided to make the buttons white. And it worked.

This is Flo at the start of one of her journeys through a complex, frozen puzzle-land. What do you mean, “I prefer the prototype”?

So that’s the basic look of Floe, and it looks lovely on the iPhone and iPad, especially on some of the later levels when lots of brightly coloured blocks stand between Flo and complete triumph!

I hope you enjoyed our little article on The Art of Floe.

Please subscribe or follow @otterlygames for updates.

In OpenGameCity in Review, Lee writes:

Richard Brooksby of Otterly hosted two game jams, one lasting 3 hours and another lasting a whole 24 hours. At game jams, people get together and make video games in a limited time, with a surprise theme. Attendees were challenged to make complete, playable games, working individually, or in small groups, starting from scratch. The results can be found over at CambridgeIndies with entries for Strawberry Jam and Blackcurrant Jam.

We’re very pleased to have helped make GameCity5 such a wonderful festival. Please enjoy some of the games, subscribe to GameCity, join in with ongoing events, and be ready for GameCity6!