Looking Back...
Hello everyone! I'm MicalPixel, the developer of May and the Amazing Bouquet!
Happy May Day (May 1)!
It's been exactly 2 years since the spark that became May and the Amazing Bouquet was born. Including May herself. Which means it's May's IRL birthday (and canon birthday).
May's initial design was finished on May 1, but she didn't get a name until the next day, May 2.
The initial idea for this game was simple:
Make a top-down pixelart action-adventure game...
Which is lighthearted and also parodies such games.
Instead of collecting eight important MacGuffins needed to vanquish evil, you would collect eight MacGuffins for a birthday party. While seemingly still taking a similar amount of time and effort on the protagonist's part. :D
And yet, for May, this quest was still very important and taken very seriously. And hopefully her enthusiasm rubs off on the player too.
The original plot had May gathering many things for throwing a party. Food, balloons, etc. I wanted this to be a cozy game, to reflect the non-threatening nature of the mission. :3
After a lot of thinking about the game, its scale, and possible other adventures, it was scaled back to collecting 8 flowers. The working title of "May and the Amazing Bouquet" was decided on February 5, 2025, and revealed later in September.
Working on this game has been a wonderful experience. I've learned so much, used a game engine for the first time, built my own audio tool, and gotten to chat with other developers and play and support their games too.
Looking Ahead...
If it wasn't clear already...
This is one of those games that "will be done when it's done." I have a full-time job and can only work on the game in my free time. Which unfortunately does mean the game will take longer to release. We're at 2 years now. But in those 2 years, my desire to finish this game has only gone up. I'm still very excited and happy to be making it.
And happily, progress is constantly being made.
In March, I finished up a tool which I'll use to make the game's audio.
And this April I finished a ground-up refactor of the entire game's codebase. This fixed many things which had become inconvenient to work with. And it made it much easier to prototype and test content for the game. This has been an enormous undertaking, and the game feels so much nicer to develop for now. The refactor included:
Editor:
Show/edit all interconnected maps at once, not one at a time.
Construct ingame objects on-the-fly rather than with lots of .tscn files
Click object in editor and jump right to its script file via F2
Only one GlobalState class (w/children) instead of dozens.
Reusable AnimationPlayer for all objects with similar animations (just replace the texture)
Can change an object's type in the GUI editor just by renaming it.
Can edit an object's keyword, identifier, and sub-type in editor, also by just renaming it.
Remove use of hardcoded coordinates in code. Use editor GUI instead
New DataBank class can fetch any data for a map by querying what the editor saved.
Larger world map size (from 8x8 to 16x12) for more room for exploration and optional content.
Scenes:
Edited text-display functions so it's easier to export text for localizers later.
Added automated pauses for punctuation characters in text like commas and periods
Branching choice menu now prevents accidentally picking choice #1 for users who are mashing "A" to advance the text.
Cutscene/dialogue scripts moved to be per-object rather than per-map (reusable, fewer files).
Scripting engine now uses a stack. Much easier to assign many different kinds of trigger types.
Expression-parser now has excellent support for arithmetic operators and nested expressions.
Other:
Created first graphical shader (dot-matrix shader, with potential for more)
So yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah things are coming along nicely. :D
Current work involves:
Begin consolidating design documents (both old and new) for easier reference.
Begin work on updated Garden Arc, including its plot, map layout, NPCs and puzzle mechanics.
The design and testing of puzzle mechanics and enemies
Making changes to my editor to make that testing easier
Continue to refine the game's plot.
My current goal is to have a playable demo ready this year. I think this is very feasible to do!
Thank you for reading, for your support, and your patience! Have a great day!