Finding the Magic Touch
In our January update, we talked about how tactile gameplay is important to Primrows and to the Tursiops brand as a whole. This month, let’s dig deep into the process of how different creative roles worked together to build a satisfying tactile feel as you prune flowers in Primrows
Art
One of the first stylistic choices we had to make for Primrows was what the flowers should look like. We settled on a style based on shapes that could exist as physical objects in a board game -- although we haven’t realized our dream of making a premium custom-cut wooden Primrows pieces, this choice has made it easy to make these little die-cut cardstock flowers that we bring to our conventions.
Although we decided against showing three-dimensional thickness in the flower artwork in-game, our artist Susan added some nice shading to sell the tactile quality of the flowers, and the hints of a shadow behind them to give them a bit more dimension compared to a minimalist or cartoon-like art style.
Sound
As pruning is the one thing in Primrows you’ll be doing more than anything else, we needed to sell the effect with some good sound effects. We went with a “thunky” cutting sound, something with a bit of volume to it, to make it feel like you were clipping through plant matter and not just snipping paper. And our sound designer Valerii made sure to include multiple samples and vary the audio a bit each time you pruned, for a more organic and less repetitive feel.
As a side note, trying to find the words to convey to a sound designer what kind of sound you’re looking for is the source of some of the most amusing design conversations you can have while developing a game.
Animation
Once the sounds were in place, we realized the sounds felt a bit naked without an animation to accompany them. We had a strictly functional animation of the pieces coming off the board, but that didn’t feel like enough. We asked our animator Jin to give the pruning action an animation that matched the sound, and she came up with this little bit: a bit of a quick outward motion to give it all a responsive feel, with a gentler follow-through as the leaves slowly fell back to the board.
UI
All of our visuals and sounds make for a satisfying experience for players, but they’ll only work if the game elements respond in the way that players expect them to. For mouse users, this is straightforward enough… but for players who want to take ‘tactile experience’ literally, we needed to put in some extra work.
Not only has our developer Cathy been testing regularly both on her Steam Deck and on an old Surface Pro 3 to make sure the touchscreen experience works and feels right, but we noticed something interesting while playtesting: some players would really get into the roleplay of the situation and would swipe the flowers off of their spaces to remove them, instead of just tapping. A little bit of custom mouse input logic was the finishing touch to get the feel of pruning just right.