Strange Horticulture devs set out to make your next favorite game
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with a goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren't really that simple at all.
I'm Rob Donkin, one half of Bad Viking. I do the code and my brother, John, does the art. We've been making games together for over a decade, starting out in Flash with silly games like Panda: Tactical Sniper and Super Villainy and moving up to more interesting (but still quite silly!) multiplayer games like Bad Eggs Online. We've dabbled in a wide variety of genres over the years!
Our latest offering, Strange Horticulture, is an unusual game about running a shop that stocks plants for all manner of occult uses. It's more of a puzzle game than a shop sim, and some have perhaps more accurately placed it in the detective genre.
At some point during the early development of Strange Horticulture we were discussing what success would look like for us. What did we hope to achieve with this game? We felt we had a strong concept that had potential but those are not guarantees of commercial success. Ignoring the obvious "some money would be nice," we settled on a goal that we realised we had never strived for on our previous projects – we would aim for just one person to call Strange Horticulture their favorite game. Not just a game that they really enjoyed but their absolute favorite game.
It was a concept that we came back to over and over during development and we hope that it's interesting enough to explore how it influenced our design decisions. Primarily what it meant for us was that we were making a whole experience rather than just a game. It meant that once we were happy with the
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