Hi friend!
In May, a new FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT trailer was featured in the Six One Indie Showcase! I even got to do a behind-the-scenes segment to talk about the inspirations behind the game. Check out the new trailer and developer segment in the video below (45:00). I even show off some never-before-seen secrets in the trailer. There are lots of cool indies featured in this showcase, so I recommend you check it out!
Welcome to all the new Tomato Club members who joined from the showcase!
FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT on Parental Leave
Surprise! My baby came 3 weeks early, which means I’m now on parental leave and giving myself a little break from any kind of production schedule for FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT. Things are awesome so far and I am really enjoying my time with little one. It was cool watching the Six One Indie showcase with a baby strapped to my chest and then having to run to a doctors appointment immediately after. That’s just life these days!
I feel really good about the recent milestones on the game. Usually I like to take a break after a big development push. I’ve found that taking breaks is extremely useful to noodle on various aspects of the game that feel “unsolved” or “unalligned”.
When I took time off to make TORSO TENNIS, (my tennis roguelike), I came back to FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT with a fresh head and was able to bring the project from a bit of an unanswered question into something with a direction, a scope, and a solvable mystery.
So what am I going to do during parental leave? I may noodle a bit on the FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT soundtrack. I made the music used in the new trailer 13 years ago, and I’m feeling a little rusty with my composition skills.
I will do a game jam project as a fun break to stay fresh and inspired, likely the 2-week Comfy Summer Jam that starts this evening. Typically I prefer the short manic sprints of 48-hour game jams but my current lifestyle has me preferring this 2-week jam format.
Red Lasers // Blue Princes
I’ve been sneaking in videogame time in short increments while my newborn sleeps. One of these games is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, a 2024 puzzle exploration game.
Lorelei is an extremely stylish non-linear puzzle exploration game. The player explores a hotel with layers of twisting secrets, narrative reveals, and puzzles. A lot of the puzzles required a combination of abstract and logical thinking to solve. These puzzles end up landing somewhere between the realms of delightful riddles and math homework from your cool math teacher. No, not the teacher that let you play games on CoolMathGames.com… These logic puzzles meshed nicely with the pick up & put down style of play that I had this month. If I was stuck, I took a break.
Lorelei’s narrative feels dense and confusing at first, almost as if it is not even worth your time to care about it. Then, a few loose threads appear at the edge of the knotted mess, and you can begin to pull on them to make sense of the events that have transpired at the hotel and for the characters.
Lorelei and the Laser eyes is like a layered Black Forest Cake, in its aesthetic presentation and overall design. The visuals of greyscale punctuated by red brings forth thoughts of layered cake, cream, and cherries. Like this cake, the design and narrative feel layered. Playing this game is like pulling back secrets underneath secrets underneath secrets.
One thing that I loved about Lorelei is how nice it felt to play a 3D game with a D-pad. All of the doorways and fixed camera angles were laid out in a way that made navigation simple and accessible. The choice of a single input button frustrated me at first (it’s tedious to back out of menus by selecting a “return” prompt), but I came to respect the design constraint once I was enveloped in the game.
After completing Lorelei, I found myself thinking of another building-exploring puzzle game, 2025’s Blue Prince. The games have so much in common, yet the experience of playing them is completely different. Both feature exploration of large estates, cryptic narratives that sprawl into the past, strong use of a central color theme, and delicious puzzles.
But these similarities feel pretty surface level to me - there’s a lot going on in these games that make them completely different experiences to play. Blue Prince’s run-based gameplay is innovative and gripping, contrasted to Lorelei’s more standard approach of methodical exploration of a fixed location. The thrill of getting a great run through Blue Prince’s Mt. Holly Estate feels exhilarating, but Lorelei’s Hotel Letztes Jahr feels like it has a stronger identity and sense of place.
The biggest difference to me is the way the games end. Lorelei’s narrative and puzzles converge into a single ending point where comprehension of the narrative and all puzzle branches are required. Finding Blue Prince’s Room 46 and rolling credits is a great moment, but the narrative is still left unresolved as are many puzzle threads that are encountered throughout the estate. I just did not like this ending, and Blue Prince fans will cope by saying “That’s not the ending!”. I do consider myself a Blue Prince fan, but I am honest about the way the game made me feel-
Blue Prince started so strong, but fizzled out until I was frustrated with it. In Lorelei, some puzzles felt a bit weaker and the AHA! moments weren’t quite as satisfying, but I really enjoyed how it wrapped up so neatly.
What I’ve been Playing
I also got around to playing Eastshade, an Open-World Painting Adventure. It has a similar presentation to an Elder Scrolls game but instead of combat and RPG mechanics, the game revolves around crafting and resolving quest lines given by NPCs by making paintings.
One of the most impactful things about this game was the initial narrative framing for exploration: you have traveled to the island of Eastshade to make 4 paintings of specific landmarks as a memorial for your mother. These initial geographical guideposts are great anchors for the experience, encouraging players on their journey to the corners of the map. Because of this framing of the major goals, it feels both sentimental and monumental to make one of these memorial paintings.
Despite the game being very quest-driven (something I don’t usually like), there were enough nice character moments to make this gameplay compelling. The slow walking speed, while frustrating at times, encouraged more of a meditative appreciation of the game world. Eastshade features a “fast-travel tea” that you can brew to visit a previously visited location, which I found to be a good compromise here in a game focused on quests that have you running back and forth a lot.
Being able to compose paintings in the game is interesting. The paintings are more-or-less fancied-up screenshots, but I found myself deeply caring about the compositions of the works I chose to make. I felt like my effort to make a pleasing image was worth it, and the NPC who commissioned the painting truly saw the beauty.
The first 7 hours of this game were absolutely magical, but it did drift off-course a bit towards the end, with the locations feeling more barren and the crafting economy completely dissolving. Still, it was an awesome world to live in for a while.
Thank you so much for reading the newsletter and following the journey! Feel free to respond to this email if you’d like to get in touch, or leave a comment on the post.
<3 Michael