some players would really get into the roleplay of the situation and would swipe the flowers off of their spaces to remove them, instead of just tapping. A little bit of custom mouse input logic was the finishing touch to get the feel of pruning just right.

Not only did our developer Cathy regularly test both on her Steam Deck and on an old Surface Pro 3 to make sure the touchscreen experience worked and felt right, but we noticed something interesting while playtesting:

Our visuals and sounds make for a satisfying experience for players, but they only work if the game responds in the way that players expect them to. For mouse users, this is straightforward enough… but for players who want to take ‘tactile experience’ literally, we needed to put in some extra work.

We asked our animator Jin to give the pruning action an animation that matched the sound, and she came up with this little bit: a bit of a quick outward motion to give it all a responsive feel, with a gentler follow-through as the leaves slowly fell back to the board.

Once the sounds were in place, we realized the sounds felt a bit naked without an animation to accompany them. We had a strictly functional animation of the pieces coming off the board, but that didn’t feel like enough.

As a side note, trying to find the words to convey to a sound designer what kind of sound you’re looking for is the source of some of the most amusing design conversations you can have while developing a game.

And our sound designer Valerii made sure to include multiple samples and vary the audio a bit each time you pruned, for a more organic and less repetitive feel.

As pruning is the one thing in Primrows you’ll be doing more than anything else, we needed to sell the effect with some good sounds. We went with a “thunky” cutting sound, something with a bit of volume to it, to make it feel like you were clipping through plant matter and not just snipping paper.

Although we decided against showing three-dimensional thickness in the flower artwork in-game, our artist Susan added some nice shading to sell the tactile quality of the flowers, and the hints of a shadow behind them to give them more dimension compared to a minimalist or cartoon-like art style.

We settled on a style based on shapes that could exist as physical objects in a board game -- although we haven’t realized our dream of making a premium custom-cut wooden Primrows pieces, this choice has made it easy to make these little die-cut cardstock flowers that we bring to our conventions.

Aaaand here we've set up a maximum speed!

We inputted the program to keep the particles within boundaries here

For this motion test, we increase the randomness of wander

-Play challenges you missed with Daily Replay
-Get to the fun parts quicker with a streamlined tutorial
-New weekly and monthly challenges
-Remembers scorecard view preferences in landscape mode
-Bugfixes for some visual glitches
-Rules clarifications for Prize Rush and Magic Watering Can rule

this premise is actually genius LOL