Hi all,

As many long time VG'ers know, I am directly involved in game development - running a development studio in Melbourne (Australia) called Nocturnal ( http://nocturnal-central.com ).

We are nearing the end of development on our next project, and with the permission of the guys here at VG - I will be using VG to *exclusively* announce the project to the gaming world, deliver the first media, press release (and more).

As a prelude to the official announcement (which should happen in around a week), I am now doing a little "unofficial" announcement of the game to get the word out. This is the first time the game has been revealed to anyone outside the company, so its effectively a "world exclusive" - right now on VG :)

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The game is called FLOWERWORKS(tm), and its a "casual/harcore" title for PCs (Windows only for now).

I won't talk too much about it now - leaving that for the official announcement, but I will say that the game involves growing flowers, launching fireworks and exploring a world - and is both an original IP and a completely unique form of gameplay (nothing that I have seen anyway!)

(if PuzzleQuest is Bejewelled x Warlords, then Flowerworks is Peggle x Zelda - as much as that is a bad analogy ;).

If anyone has any questions on that game, I'll be more than happy to try and answer them. Otherwise, look out for the official announcement around next weekend...

Look forward to seeing it.

Will it be advertisement supported or is there a store/online paid release?

Congratulations on nearing the completion of your project.

Bah, no PS3 support. Lazy developers, I say.

Seriously, though, I can't wait until I get into the game dev industry. These courses in Maths better be worth it!

In Japanese, the word for "fireworks" is actually "flower-fire," so in Japanese, your title isn't even a pun, but makes perfect sense.

Big beautiful flowers bursting in outer space.

I can't wait for more information, based on your insane analogy. Keep us posted.

No plans for a retail release, but that could change depending on who we partner with. Looking at various options for a digital distribution release at the moment.

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PS3? The gameplay "requires" a pointer, so its not an ideal game for either the 360 or PS3. That, and the PS3 is probably the most expensive platform to develop for. I'd *love* to work on a PS3 version, but its rather unlikely at the moment.

In some ways, the game has similarities with both "Flower" & "Pixeljunk:Eden". I only checked out Eden a few weeks back, and had a shock when I realised how similar the game was to what we were doing - then on closer inspection, the two games are quite different (just have some similiar graphical elements).

lol, sorry shams if my joke was crap, it just seems that if there's not a PS3 version, or it's shoddy in someway, it's 'cause of lazy developers.

Not at all, its a valid question - and it was/is a valid platform under consideration. If Flowerworks does well enough, our next game could end up on the PS3... :)

congrats,

I m waiting for others news ...

Interesting, I will certainly take a look at this, any screenshots avaliable yet?

We need to finalise a few key assets in the game before I'm happy releasing screenshots to the public. They will come soon enough.

Its also the sort of game that looks a lot better in motion than it does static (not that it looks bad in static shots) - but there is a lot of motion, animation - even some procedurally generated geometry & animation (etc).

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Its nice to see interest in it :)