HTHRFLWRS #9 - The Year of Animals

Hi everyone! Wow, what a year! Right? What a year. What was your favorite part? Yeah, mine too.

It’s funny, writing a year-in-review post at this point in my life. This year has been extremely eventful, while also having very little I’m able to talk publicly about. I have my sights set on a publicly-exciting 2025, though, full of events that I can’t talk about yet but will hopefully be able to talk about once they happen!

So, what can I talk about? I can talk about snakes, goats, fish, wolves, and cockroaches.

SNAKES

This year started off with SNAKE FARM’s final content expansion, ECONOMIES OF SCALE!

Making content updates for SNAKE FARM was a ton of fun — CURSE OF RAMONA was a huge leap ahead for the game, and ECONOMIES OF SCALE allowed me to fill out the rest of the possibility space nicely. SNAKE FARM feels “complete” now: it’s explored all the potential of its base premise, while leaving room for expansion in the sequel.

My big positive takeaway from SNAKE FARM was that this type of game is really fun to make!! I’ll get more into this later on in the newsletter, but suffice it to say I’m very happy to be working in this genre again with FISH FEAR ME.

My big negative takeaway from SNAKE FARM is that endless mode sucks and almost always makes roguelikes worse. SNAKE FARM is very tightly balanced around a particular limitation (the ten day limit) and throwing that out immediately makes the game worse. I’ll cop to endless mode having its own direct implementation problems (including, uh, snakes getting so fast they just teleport away forever) but they’re very much exacerbated by balance decisions which made perfect sense in a ten-day game mode but completely break when that limitation is removed. Endless mode: don’t do it!

GOATS

The next big project I worked on in 2024 was The Last Days of Friendship Valley.

I know, I promised I’d get the demo for this one out by the end of the year, but it turned out to not be in the cards. Friendship Valley is a hugely ambitious project that I’ve been slowly working on for years, and I’ll probably continue slowly working on it for years. The good news is that it’s more concrete now than it’s ever been, and it’s very well-set-up for further expansion.

My big positive takeaway from Friendship Valley is I’m very proud of this game!! It’s a very complex game with a lot of very cool mechanics, and the work the rest of the team put into it is absolutely amazing. Part of why I’m so determined to get this demo done eventually is so y’all can see all the work they put in.

My big negative takeaway from Friendship Valley is the word “eventually.” It’s always been a passion project: after SNAKE FARM’s success, I was able to spend a few months working exclusively on it, but that time regrettably ran out faster than expected. Someday I’ll get back to it, but I don’t know when that’ll be.

FISH

In happier news, FISH FEAR ME is coming soon!

FISH FEAR ME is the spiritual sequel to SNAKE FARM, and like any good spiritual sequel, it’s bigger, more polished, and weirder. It’s taking a lot of the lessons I learned from SNAKE FARM (including, yes, having no endless mode — there is something planned for after the seven-day run is done, but it’s definitely not endless). Right now the big challenge, in addition to having a ton more content, is to raise the skill floor to the SNAKE FARM level: right now the game is very opaque at the offset. This is somewhat by design — the game intentionally becomes more opaque the further you go, so your search for forbidden knowledge involves literally trying to understand the cursed logic of the world’s artifacts — but I should really include a proper tutorial at some point. Maybe Gull fishes you out of a block of ice and tells you how bait works? I’ll chew on it.

I don’t really have takeaways from this one yet, since it’s still in development! It’ll be coming early 2025 if all goes well.

WOLVES

Finally, I did a 7DFPS game with my friend Noé called WOLFCLAW! It’s a gory eat-em-up arcade game where you play as a werewolf ghost possessing, killing, and eating as many people/robots as possible. Also it has this cute robot I animated!

I mostly work in 2d these days, so it was a fun change of pace to do some 3d stuff. I think the game turned out pretty nice!!

COCKROACHES

When I started this newsletter a few months ago, I declared 2024 to be the “Year of the Cockroach” — that being small and sturdy was the way to survive a chaotic industry. I’m still figuring out whether my assessment was correct! It’s certainly been a chaotic year, with its share of difficulties and setbacks. I’m in several limbos right now: in-progress projects, half-finished plans, schemes that have yet to see fruition. Limbo isn’t bad, but it does mean I need to be a little patient with my assessment. In a few months, I’ll know for sure whether the choices I made this year were worth it.

Happy New Year. I’ll see y’all in 2025. <3

— Heather

P.S. Question of the week: What’s the biggest lesson you learned this year? How are you planning on applying it next year?

Want to respond to the discussion questions? Email me at heatherflowersbusiness@gmail.com!