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Indie Game Spotlight: Florence

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we knew this week’s Indie Game Spotlight had to focus on love. Today we’re celebrating the one year anniversary of Florence. Winner of Best Mobile Game 2018 at The Game Awards and recipient of Apple’s Design Award, Florence tells a story of our protagonist, a 25-year-old named Florence who meets her first love, a cello player named Krish. Each level is a different minigame vignette that tells the story primarily through the gameplay and visuals rather than words.

We were able to talk with Sam Crisp, a programmer at Mountains—the craft game studio that created this lovely game—about Florence, falling in love, and new ways to tell stories in games. 

How did the initial idea behind Florence come to fruition?

We wanted to make a new kind of mobile game that no one had done before. One that was intimate and emotional and that would appeal and resonate with anyone, even if they didn’t play games at all. We started by playing around with the idea of solving a series of jigsaw puzzles that could tell a story through the metaphors of putting broken things back together. What does it mean when there’s a piece missing from a jigsaw, or if the pieces don’t fit together? Pretty soon we realized we were making a game about the struggles of love.

How did the team choose to focus on modern love relationships?

We need more romance in games! They’re universal stories, and everyone on the team could bring a lot of their own experiences to making the game. Stories about modern love are huge in every media form but are still underrepresented in game stories, despite the fact that games exploring this theme are some of the most interesting and forward-thinking games out there! But practically, we knew we wanted to make a game about a single person going through change in their life. And first love is one of the most transformative experiences we could hone in on.

In Florence, there is a mini-game to create dialogue through a puzzle system. How did the team come up with the concept?

We came up with a lot of ideas for minigames, and the jigsaw puzzle was one of the earliest that still remains in the final game. We had this important scene where Florence and Krish were getting to know each other for the first time and we were trying to find a way to represent that in a minigame. So we asked ourselves, what does it feel like when you go on a date with someone and you go from being nervous and awkward to breaking the ice and feeling like you get along with someone? And we tried out the idea of having to physically make conversation by putting these jigsaw puzzles together, and have the puzzles get easier over time, and the idea just worked. When we got people to play that level and try it out, they understood right away what was happening.

The game can be referred to as a “slice of life.” How was Florence able to gamify everyday experiences?

The interactive language of smartphones and games provide a lot of readymade metaphors for us to work with. For instance, the level Moving In takes the “inventory tetris” from games like Diablo and maps that onto the rituals of compromise involved in cohabitating with someone. Also when Florence is stuck in a bad routine, we made repetitive minigames out of everything, like doing accounting at her day job, scrolling through social media, and even talking to her mum on the phone, in order to show that she’s treating everything in her life as rote, and that she thinks everything is a chore! We went through a lot of trial and error with many different ideas of how to turn everyday life into minigames and what you see in the final game are the ones that worked the best.

How do imagery and colors relay the characters’ inner state?

We don’t have much text, talking or traditional narration in Florence at all so we had to communicate everything to the player through imagery and interaction. Florence’s life starts out dull, colorless and repetitive. When we flashback early in the game and see her as a child, we see that her life used to be full of color but now it’s full of grays. When she meets Krish, he brings color to her life, and that’s the first time we see the color yellow in the game. And at the end of the game when Florence truly finds herself we introduce green to the color palette. The color motifs are subtle but very effective. And there are similar techniques used in the melodies of the music too.

It’s been a year since Florence has been out! What has happened in the past year and what’s next for the team?

The response we’ve had to Florence has been amazing. The game has resonated with all sorts of people all over the world. We’ve had people write in telling us that they played the game at a difficult time in their lives and that the story helped them work through what they were going through. And we’ve seen people be inspired by Florence to make their own games using similar storytelling techniques but telling their own unique story, which everyone here at Mountains is thrilled to see. Right now we are hard at work on the next thing, and we hope to have something to share with you soon!

Already in love with Florence? The good news is it can be purchased at the App Store through Google Play. iam8bit has announced the upcoming release of a vinyl soundtrack for the critically acclaimed mobile game. Accompanying this slice of life story is a gentle, charming, and emotional score composed by Kevin Penkin, now available for pre-order at the iam8bit store.