Making of Flabby Part 3: Dirt Devil in the Details

In the previous post, I mentioned how our initial concept art had a fundamental problem.  Unfortunately, we had to scrap a lot of the beautiful details in the design to refocus the player's attention on the core task at hand:  Avoiding the chocolate pillars of doom! 

Color-coordinated swatches were used to make a beautiful composition

In fact, even this was too busy.  If Flabby were to fly low on the screen, it will be lost in the chocolate peaks and caramel valleys.  We had to restrict the eye candy (ha!) to a maximum of 30% of the screen and settled on this:

The biggest take-away from this is that oftentimes, design has to take a backseat to gameplay.  We are fortunate that our designer understands our priorities and is willing to take it as a design challenge, rather than criticism of her work.  realGameDev is blessed to have her on our team :)

I realize that this was a very design-centric "Making of..." so the next one will be a more development oriented one.  I will most likely do a double post on Gamasutra as well.  Post-mortems they like to call it.