Superbloom is a cozy game where you fly around as a bumblebee pollinating flowers. The flower's color and shape vary based on what flower you've taken pollen from and what kind of flower you're giving it to. In our initial concept, players would also have an energy bar that would deplete while flying and have "flower quests", which would require them to propagate certain types and colors of flowers.
Superbloom was created during Ludum Dare #53, which had the theme of delivery. We bounced around a few ideas, but the idea of a cute, relaxing game focused on making the world a better place resonated with the group, and thus, Superbloom was born.
From the start, I felt a painted aesthetic was fitting for a game about flowers - probably because I grew up admiring Van Gogh and Matisse. So when I began designing the game's UI, I mainly looked to classic painterly works for inspiration. When brainstorming on the game's mood, Yoshi Story and Flower served as excellent starting points to create a mixture of "cute" and "peaceful".
The gameplay of cozy games can vary quite a bit, but there was inspiration to be found in the UI patterns (e.g. energy bars, progress indicators) and how they contributed to the overall cozy "vibe" of the game.
With only 72 hours and this being a vibes-centric kind of game, I wanted to keep the UI pretty minimal. I opted for a simple linear energy bar and a circular progress indicator for the flower quests to use screen space more efficiently.
Even though we didn't have much time, I decided to mock up a low fidelity wireframe to get a sense for the size and layout of the elements. This helped later on when I was creating the UI elements in Photoshop.
I wanted the UI to have a raw, hand-painted feeling, but still feel like an interface, so choosing the right kind of brush to use for each element was paramount. Below are some test swatches that helped me narrow down which brushes to use.
Working with one of the artists on the team, we quickly came up with a color palette that worked with our game. From there, I was able to make the high fidelity assets and start implementing them into Unity.
Because of our tight timeline and the importance of the gameplay screen, I wanted to keep the pause and start menus as straightforward as possible. I was told by one of my teammates that we'd be able to make the start menu render on top of the game's initial state. This would allow us have a seamless transition between the menu and the actual game.
As for the pause menu, I opted for a centered layout since I knew it'd scale well and it was a common approach to that type of UI in many different games.
Once I was happy with the layout and size of the assets, I created the painted assets for the start and pause menus and implemented them in Unity.
Three days might seem like enough time for a game like Superbloom, but it went by quickly. We tried our best to ship all of the features we had initially conceived, but had to cut the energy bar and flower quest systems to focus on more fundamental gameplay elements such as flying and pollinating.
Because these systems were no longer in scope, their UI elements were understandably removed. As much as I wanted to ship the game's UI in its entirety, the removal of those systems took the game in a different, more peaceful direction. We were overjoyed to see the comments on our Ludum Dare Jam entry page praising the game for feeling "soothing" and "relaxing" as a result of having no real objectives other than to make the world beautiful.
