Flambuoyancy was created by Pink Lemonade as a project for our Production 1 class in a 4-week time frame.
Pink Lemonade:
Producer/Scrum Master: Kinsey Bowensmith
Lead Designer: Ryan Swanson
Lead Programmer: Adam Clarke
Lead Artist: Cameron Howell
Description:
Flambuoyancy is a 2-4 player party game where players act as members of a flamingo flock, or Flamboyance, fighting against each other over new sources for food. Normally flamingos will filter their food in shallow waters to gain their daily dose of Carotenoids, a pigment found in their food that turns them pink. Flamingos rely on their pink color as a symbol of dominance in their flamboyance. These power-hungry flamingos have eaten all food in the shallow parts of the lake and are starting to lose their pink colors. The flamingos have adapted by starting to dive in deeper waters to try to collect their food, but there is not enough food to go around. Players must dash around the map collecting food while also avoiding other flamingos that will try to steal what they have collected. Only one can lead the Flamboyance.
Intent:
The goal of Flambuoyancy was to create a fun and competitive party game featuring an unusual control scheme. While the overall theme is meant to be wacky, wild, and weird, the gameplay should feel fast and concise.
Inspiration:
The prompt for this project was to make a game based on a certain color. Our group was assigned pink. We spent a lot of time researching the color pink, its different meanings and uses across the world. Ultimately we were inspired by Flamingos and how much of their lives revolve around their color. Flamingos are not born pink. In fact, they are born grayish white. In order for them to become pink and maintain their bold color, flamingos eat foods in their diet that is naturally high in a pigment called carotenoids that is found within plants and crustaceans. Flamingos also have the ability to store their carotenoid harvest through their crop milk which is that they use to feed their newborns. To a flamingo their color is more than just a flashy accessory, it is a status symbol. A pinker flamingo shows that the individual is strong and good at finding food. As flamingos are aggressive birds by nature it is important for them to be at the top of the food chain to prevent the risk of injury.
Gameplay:
Players all share the same screen, broken into 2-4 quadrants depending on how many players. Play takes place in a lake with an underground cave system. They must look for and collect plants and krill to harvest carotenoids. Players can either be explorers that avoid other players, looking to gain carotenoids solely from food sources or they can be attackers that look to use their dashes and slam into other flamingos, briefly stunning them and forcing them to drop a percentage of their catch. Play lasts for 2 minutes.
Players are not the only animals in the food chain. Krill roaming around the map will eat any plants that they come in contact with, increasing both in size carotenoid value. This ensures that carotenoids from the plants they eat are not lost forever but also provides the challenge of trying to catch unpredictable krill with higher value.
In the early game, play is more focused around exploring the map and trying to collect a stash of carotenoids. As the play progresses players begin to become more aggressive, looking to slam into other players. The amount dropped is 25% of a player's current value, so getting slammed near towards the end of the game when players have a larger stash collected can be costly.
World:
Our world is meant to be big enough for all four players to explore independently but compact enough for players to be able to move around the map and interact with other players.
At the start of development, we did not know if we wanted to use split-screen, with each player having their own separate screen, or to have everyone share the same screen, so we developed builds and maps for both.
Our first concept on the left is a bigger overall map that would use split-screen. Using split-screen would allow us to create a much bigger map to allow more areas to explore independently. Our second concept on the right was a bit smaller to allow the player to be able to share the screen. For this, the map needed to be smaller to see the whole map and everyone on it at the same time without making the player too small to see. The arrows indicate the flow of currents that can be used as shortcuts to get from one area of the map to another.
These are the same two concepts built out a little bit more and as seen in unity. We used these two concepts to test out our two different camera modes. Our goal now was to use QA testing to make an informed decision on how we wanted people to play our game. This process took us a week and a half to come to a final decision as our results came up inconclusive with our first few tests. People enjoyed the game, but they were not sure which version they enjoyed more as testers were equally as vocal about both.
As developers we liked the split-screen version of the game because the single screen had two major issues: The map was too big for the screen scaling and too small for the game time. The scaling was implemented so that when all players were closer together, their flamingos would be larger. This shifted player focus away from the smaller sources of carotenoids to the larger, more rewarding option of slamming into other flamingos. However, when players got too far away from each other, they would become too small, and often lose track of their flamingo. This meant that the map was too big. When factoring in the game time for the map it is also too small for three minutes of play.
To fix these we concepted two smaller maps that would remove the scaling issues and theorized doing three short rounds at each location fixing our other issue. Now we could do three 1 minutes rounds with smaller maps. We did not want to hastily make a decision while players still enjoyed our other map and the split-screen cameras.
The concept on the left was inspired by lazy rivers. The general idea was to have a centralized current to take players around the map. This concept had more of a focus on exploration, allowing people and adding to their stashes.
The concept on the right was more focused on the idea of chase, with more open areas for players to slam into each other causing them to drop carotenoids, but also adding a lot of ways to evade other players.
At this time continuing to develop two builds, scaling down the first map, and creating two more levels was out of scope for our project's timeline so we needed to make a decision on build soon. However, before going too far with these new concepts, we finally had a definitive result from our testing. With a revised mini-map that increased individual screen size, people preferred split screen over a single screen. With that question finally settled we moved to revise the map to focus more on the player experience within the world.
In this iteration, we changed the most about our world. The most notable being the currents. In the early version of the map, the currents were few and far between rendering them useless to the player. In this version we took the idea from the lazy river concept and increased the overall size of the map, making the currents a key part of moving the environment efficiently. We added more plants to the map and lowered their respawn timer to counter issues with scarcity in the mid-game. We also added more of a mix of narrow and open spaces so that the players had a better mix in the environment.
Upon playtesting this new map we found that while players liked the individual changes we made, overall player enjoyment went down. This was directly due to the new map size. Overall this newer version was close to double the size of the first iteration and proved to be way too big. We found that players were more focused on exploring and eating plants and krill than they were with interacting with each other. Without being able to interact with other players they overwhelming thought that the game was not as competitive. With this feedback, we went back to the drawing board again.
Above is our final iteration of the map. We cut the areas to the left and right of the currents as well as the lowermost area, added better visual clues for the direction of the currents, and revised the internal layout. In the middle is our larger, more open area for players to try to slam each other. To the left and right of that are more narrow areas allowing players to have a variety of different directions to move in. Finally, there are four main sections to the lazy river that allow the player more freedom to use them, fixing an earlier issue of sometimes being trapped in them.