Ever wonder how far you would go to protect your family from alien invaders? How about protecting your flower garden from extremist invaders from outer-space? Well, if you combine both scenarios you’ll get Flowerman, a bright and visually appealing title from Ubrothers. Jimmy and Jessie’s home have been attacked and their flowers are in grave danger. Players can take control of Jimmy and fend off the aliens in real-time isometric action, using a club and a slime shotgun. The game also features a two-player cooperative mode, where a second player can join in as Jimmy’s wife, Jessie. Marek Uhrin, CEO of Ubrothers, had a few things to say about the game in this Q&A, check it out below.


Q [William Usher] - How did you come up with the concept for the game Flowerman?

[Marek Uhrin] - We wanted to create a unique game that offers something new, funny and simple. We were inspired by the idea that people always liked to protect something. Protecting is just the video games' standard for fun and keeping players motivated to play. Family and its property seemed to be the best choices, simply because everyone likes (and have) to protect the family and its property.

Simple gameplay concept, dynamic action with arcade features and a game suitable for males and females of all ages were main goals of our concept. We dressed the game into the beautiful graphics, animations and rich sound content that is rarely seen even in some older or weaker AAA games. The game concept has been dynamically adapted to the technical and players' needs during all time of our development. This caused the game to be incredibly smooth and polished leaving only a positive experience in players' hearts and minds (and players' fingers too:)).

Q [William Usher] - How long has Flowerman been in development?

[Marek Uhrin] - We have been working on it since October 2005 and we will completely finish it around end of October 2006. Clean development time is around 10 months, because we've had some "empty" weeks filled with necessary common life duties :) Overall, I can say time of development of Flowerman is 1 year.

Q [William Usher] - Has Ubrothers worked on any other games prior to Flowerman, or is this the company's first collective project?

[Marek Uhrin] - We have no other games completely finished for PCs, but from older times, we have 2 games finished for ZX spectrum. These are Fugitive (arcade maze game) and Destructor (air fighter shooter). We are of course preparing more awesome projects for PC and MAC gamers.

Q [William Usher] - The visuals in Flowerman are very striking, giving gamers bright colors and amazing looking characters. How did you come up with the visual art style for game, and was it always intended for the game to have a cheerful overtone with the colorful characters?

[Marek Uhrin] - Yes, it was always intended to have colorful characters and environments that will give the game an amazing, unforgettable look. Visually, everything needed to "fit" everything to achieve graphical harmony. But some graphic elements needed to be in contrast with each other. For example animated objects had to be recognizable from the backgrounds and environments and attractive for spectators. Some static objects helped to enrich the graphical quality too.

It was quite challenging, but we could never imagine our game being visually boring, so after couple (well sometimes a bit more than a couple) of tweaks and some more hours of hard work we ended up with eye warming results that can satisfy at least (if not all) the majority of players.

Q [William Usher] - Did Flowerman require a lot of third-party software for its development, or was everything designed in-house?

[Marek Uhrin] - All development parts of Flowerman code, utilities, scripts, graphics, sound and music were designed and created in house. The only exception is that we use Ogg Vorbis 3rd party libraries for sounds and music.

Q [William Usher] - Following up on that question. How long did it take you to design the characters for Flowerman?

[Marek Uhrin] - All artwork for the game was created by 1 graphic artist animator and that is probably one of the reasons why Flowerman's graphics is so pleasant for players' eyes. It took about 6 months to create all graphics for Flowerman including all animations and static artwork.

To be more specific the main character "Jimmy" was created and animated (including facial animations) in around 3 weeks. "Jessie" took about 1 week to finish. Some characters took 2 weeks but some of them were created in 3 days. It was really individual for each character.

Generally, most of the time was spent on tweaking characters' animations, creating characterized walks, still animations, attacks or other animations and redesigning characters if anything seemed to be "out of place".

Characters are 3d rendered under around 45 degree camera providing attractive 3d like look, then 2d retouched and post processed. There were plenty of hand touches to keep the look of the characters fresh and clean, extraordinary and interesting. Characters were intended to have big eyes and cute outlines (and preferably be fat) to keep them funny extraterrestrial looking. This gives the game a comic smell too. The same can also be said about the rest of static artwork.

Q [William Usher] - Was there a lot of deliberating on what sort of weapons would be available for players to use, or how they would work in the game?

[Marek Uhrin] - There was a lot of deliberating about the weapons in FlowerMan. Firstly we didn't want to have any weapons at all, but it showed to be really not interesting nor funny without some classic features like hitting with a club or shooting slime balls out of the home made shooting gun. The game was designed to contain as little amount of violence as possible to be suitable for kids and all people worldwide. We think this game can be played by anyone and contains only the minimum of unnecessary amount of something that might be called as "violence".

Choosing these 2 types of "weapons" we managed all players to feel what they are doing in the game and behave naturally as if they were protecting their own families with something that is closest to their hands like wooden club not anything like a hyper plasma laser gun.

And another huge tweaking was done with how the weapons work in the game. We wanted to let the player control them as easy as possible, but also retain the effects of how they move and behave. Tweaking the club to hit precisely as we wanted it to hit took almost one week of testing and modifying its behavior. Shooting the gun was a bit easier to implement, but required a lot of testing and playing too.

To enrich the game, it offers 3 types of shots (classic single powered shot, spread spray shot and grenade like shot) of course these are all "slime" shots. No explosions just slimy slime and a wooden club. What can be more natural than that?

Now the game offers a very simple 1 button mouse control as well as other types of controls for advanced and experienced players. And also, the possibility to play dual player game with a 2nd player using the keyboard. Even with that simplicity of the controls, it is possible to power up your hits and shots by holding down the action button, then releasing and it all fits smoothly into the gameplay. It really wasn't easy to implement good game controls, but we are satisfied with the results and players will be pleased too.

Q [William Usher] - Will the multiplayer support also include network play, or will the game be focused on a multiplayer mode for one computer?

[Marek Uhrin] - FlowerMan will be for 2 players on 1 computer only. However, we have a "secret plan" for FlowerMan 2 to be internet multiplayer game, but it is still just an idea. We will have to wait for the feedback from players and if they would like to play FlowerMan 2 on the internet.

Q [William Usher] - Any final comments for fans of the independent scene?

[Marek Uhrin] - Well OK, let' say something very wise here ;): Never give up, believe in your ideas and yourself, have a clear vision, be confident and free, know your value, be flexible and do not let yourself be discouraged by negative feedback from jealous people.. and have fun with your games ;)