S3E05.1 - FloraVista Creator Interview (bonus)

#FloraVista #Gardening #Botany #InvasiveSpecies #BoardGames #Science #SciComm

Summary

It must be Kickstarter season, because we have another bonus interview about a new game that just went live on Kickstarter. FloraVista is a game about gardening and plants, so our hosts just had to have the creators on to talk about their inspiration, what sort of plants and botanists made it into the game, how these do or don't reflect reality, their favorite plants and least-favorite invasives, and all sorts of botanical goodness. So grab some gardening gloves and enjoy this special bonus interview from Gaming with Science.

Timestamps

00:00 Introductions
03:30 What is FloraVista?
13:09 Plant mechanics and reality
16:50 Botanists in the game
22:59 Game design lessons
29:46 Favorite games and favorite plants
34:46 Wrap-up

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Lanny 0:00
Announcer,

Brian 0:06
hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.

Jason 0:11
Today is a creator interview about Flora VISTA by far out Fox games.

Brian 0:17
All right. Welcome back to gaming with science. Today, we're doing a creator interview with the creators of flora, VISTA, Carey Drake and ‍ Lanny Gross from Far Out Fox games. Thank you for joining us.

Lanny 0:27
Hi all. Thanks for having us.

Carey 0:28
Yeah, thanks for having us.

Jason 0:30
Can y'all give us a bit of a background about yourselves and about far out Fox games, and then we'll jump into this game about plants. Brian and I always love those which is why we're doing the spotlight

Brian 0:41
Absolutely

Lanny 0:42
So Carey and I have been friends for probably eight to 10 years now, and we connected instantly over board games. And when the pandemic started, we were both looking for a hobby or a creative outlet for our time when everyone remembers you were sort of like stuck inside and the world seemed perilous and like you couldn't do anything. So we were trying to find something to do and find something that sparked our creative passion. And Carrie and I discovered that we both had a passion for making board games, and Carrie showed me a poster board he had made when he was like eight or 10 of like a board game. And Carrie remind me of the theme of that.

Carey 1:30
I've had many themes of board games. One was, you're walking through a swamp, you get eaten by alligators, and you're trying to you're trying to survive without losing all of your body parts would make, yeah,

Lanny 1:47
like classic 10 year old, there's a way that you get stuck in a loop between two spaces, and that's how you're game ends I guess? No, and I have been doing that as well. I have a few projects that are like an alpha and beta that are not Flora VISTA. And we kind of decided, What if we collaborate on something? We both were looking for a project, and so out of that, Flora VISTA was born. We've been working on that since about 2022 Yeah, so it's been a long time, but we're excited to be at this point, to be ready to almost take it out to Kickstarter and launch it to the public.

Brian 2:26
That's very cool.

Jason 2:27
Yeah. And by the time this episode is dropped, the Kickstarter should be live, so anyone listening can check it out if it sounds like something you'd like. I

Brian 2:27
I think that, you know, obviously, playing board games is a lot of fun. Designing board games is also very fun in a kind of a different way. It's, it's satisfying. You scratch a different itch with that. You know, you're not the first people I've heard who the inspiration for this came from covid lockdown. Quite a number of creative projects have their origin in that period of time.

Lanny 2:53
Yeah, absolutely. And it was a good way to engage with ourselves, engage with some friends, be able to do something creative and out of the box when it sort of seemed like you couldn't do anything else.

Brian 3:04
We talked to somebody previously who they were playing Pandemic Legacy with their board game group when the covid and I think they said they had to stop playing, because

Lanny 3:16
that one has not come back into my rotation, to be totally honest, and it's just been too real, you know, and it's a great game, which is like, sad, because I'm like, I'm emotionally maybe, maybe in 2025, we're ready to come back to pandemic?

Jason 3:31
All right. So we met y'all at Southern Fried gaming expo here in Atlanta, where you were demoing your game. And again, Brian and I both like, lots of plants. So we saw this game that was about gardening and building your garden, and that I did not have a chance to play it, but Brian did. Can you tell us a little, just a little bit quick overview of like, how the game plays, and then, what was your inspiration? What made you decide to make a game about building a garden?

Carey 3:54
I mean, I can speak to some of the inspiration for Flora Vista. I think when Lanny and I met during covid, we both knew we wanted to make a board game, but we didn't really know exactly what we wanted to do before we'd met, I'd been playing around with a theme just around plants, and figuring out, you know, what are some like, maybe cool mechanics we could do around plants and that general theme. And Lanny, he had actually already been working on an idea from his time at CNN. It was about like news articles and putting like news articles together. And it was kind of like this matching mechanic of finding like articles, reporters, themes, things like that. And we were like, Okay, that sounds like a really cool mechanic that we could kind of translate into this plant theme. So we kind of like combined two different things we were working on and started kind of iterating based on that. It's funny. When we first started, like, in 2022 we're like, okay, we're going to launch, you know, six months. That seems pretty easy, right? When? Here we are, you know, a few years later, still working on it and learning as we go, but we drew a lot of inspiration from games, you know, with beautiful artwork like wingspan, we. Have over 120 different plants, and each one has original watercolor style artwork. So, like the imagery, the illustrations that that's a huge component of our game, we both saw, like plants, you know, gardening during covid, like that became, like a really just popular, popular thing to do, right? And we're like, you know what? I think that's that's something we could potentially capitalize on, and a lot of people can connect with and relate to. And so that's kind of how we landed on that theme for plant you need

Brian 5:30
to work on a trio. Now it can be gardening, raising backyard chickens and baking sourdough bread.

Lanny 5:36
I know Right, exactly. I haven't gotten into sourdough starter yet, but my sister keeps on threatening to give me hers.

Brian 5:43
That's quite the threat.

Lanny 5:46
I know. I know I should just roll over and accept it. Yeah. So that was a big part of our inspiration, and I personally got into more gardening over covid I struggle with like, 90% shade garden, which has been a big challenge in my house of figuring out, okay, what won't die my garden, we have a lot of some really nice, smaller ground cover plants, but it was really fun to, kind of like relate back to, okay, this is a hobby I'm getting into, and it's fun to learn so much about the plants. And then going back to Jason's other part of the question, how does the gameplay work in Flora Vista, we had always intended for it to be a relatively easy game to pick up that you could play with a family my father, who likes board games but finds some of the rules challenging plays and enjoys and can win at Flora Vista. I think Carey's played with nieces and nephews. I played with my sister in law's grandkids, and so it's very family friendly. And the game is sort of, at its core, a matching game. You're playing matching pairs of plant cards and region cards. So every plant has a season within which you can plant it and a matching region card. So you are playing your plant cards to grow out your own botanical garden. And they're you're playing your way through seasons, and the gameplay takes place over three years. So there are 12 rounds as you play your way through spring, summer, fall and winter, and you'll continue to create and expand and develop your own Botanical Garden by playing matching pairs and kind of the strategy component is, how do I maximize the points of my cards and grow the garden that will yield The most cultivation points.

Brian 7:41
You guys also have a different flavors of garden, right? There's a kitchen garden. And what are some of the garden types that you have?

Lanny 7:49
Yeah, so those are our different region cards, and we've got eight in the game. There is chef's garden, plants of Asia, plants of Europe, perennial pathway, Woodland walk, full bloom Alley, exhibition garden, Carrie. Do you remember the eighth

Carey 8:06
evergreen grove?

Lanny 8:08
Evergreen grove? Yes, and all of the regions relate to real characteristics of the plants. So any plant that can be planted in plants of Asia is native to originally from Asia. Anything that can be planted in chef's garden is an edible plant. We're not like encouraging foraging here, but like, go out and grow your own basil. You know the perennial pathway plants are real life perennial plants. So those are sort of the inspiration, and the tie back into to science.

Jason 8:46
A question I have is, how did you pick which plants to go in here? Because, I mean, there are hundreds to 1000s of plants you could have chosen. So how did you pick which ones made the

Brian 8:55
cut? Were you walking around town and just kind of looking at the cool plants or, you know, how did you, how did you decide what not to include?

Carey 9:02
We have a massive Excel sheet somewhere in Google Drive, and we went through and probably had, could be 300 plants or more. And we understand, we have these mechanics and these regions, and we're like, it kind of came down to balance and like, what plants can we find so that we could have a well balanced game, you know, we can have an even number in plants of Asia, plants of Europe, you know, etc. Lanny did most of the plant research. And so we have, you know, a little Encyclopedia of interesting facts for all sorts of plants based on that.

Brian 9:37
And now you can, you've got fodder for your expansions, right,

Lanny 9:40
right, exactly. And there were quite a few that, like, as we got into researching a lot of the plants that are native to Australia, for example, like, don't grow anywhere else, which we've, I mean, totally makes sense for the biome of Australia, but it made it hard to find. We. Wanted to and have global representation of plants. But you know, we have to be very intentional with, like, our plants from Australia, to be like, Okay, where can we fit these in so that they work within the game and still can represent plants from around the world? But it was a really interesting process of seeing, sort of like, okay, there are these plants that are very that grow in very specific biomes, that kind of don't thrive and live outside of that. It was really cool, but it sort of like ended up being very limiting to tie into the game's mechanics.

Brian 10:34
Is there a venus flytrap card or not?

Lanny 10:36
No. Well

Brian 10:38
for that reason, right?

Lanny 10:39
Yeah, yes. But what a great card that could be. You've got me excited about other expansions,

Jason 10:48
the carnivorous plant garden.

Brian 10:50
Maybe carnivorous plants just in general, right? You know, there's the carnivorous plant garden. There's also the poison garden.

Carey 10:56
Two expansion ideas,

Lanny 10:58
I'm avoiding the poison garden.

Brian 10:59
You're avoiding the poison guarden?. The poison garden is so much fun.

Lanny 11:02
The poison garden is so much fun until I have poison oak all over me and I'm scratching like crazy,

Brian 11:11
no foxglove, Then?

Lanny 11:12
maybe in the future, it's more fun when it's a card and I'm not tromping through it.

Brian 11:19
So you have custom artwork for all your cards, right? You use? Did you work with a single illustrator or multiple illustrators?

Carey 11:25
We have two illustrators, Brandon D hunt and Stan Clark. They're both based here in Atlanta, and they do a really wonderful job. One actually does physical media, so actual watercolor on physical media, and then Stan does digital media, but they've actually done a really great job of blending those two art styles and representing those on the cards.

Lanny 11:49
And they're also both Atlanta based artists. So actually, Carey and I live in Atlanta, Brandon and Stan live in Atlanta, our graphic designers from Atlanta, so it's been nice to work with an Atlanta based creative team,

Brian 12:01
nice, homegrown,

Lanny 12:02
yeah, and as we've had updates, it's been fun to be able to share those with our graphic designer and our illustrators as well, because it's cool to see it on a computer, but it's so much different physically having the cards in your hand and seeing all of the hard work come to life.

Carey 12:20
One thing about the art style is it's not just watercolor art style. We kind of have taken this approach where we want to show, like, a disarticulated life cycle of a plant that it might go through. So like one of my favorite plants, the California Poppy, it has like three branches, and it shows you, you know, what it looks like before it's going to bloom, you know, as it's blooming, and then once it's in full bloom, and then there's some seeds next to it as well. So you kind of get not just like the plant when it's in full season, in full bloom, but the kind of that whole life cycle of that plant, which is kind of interesting to see, it's got that almanac type feel

Jason 12:58
Yeah, it's like a botanical illustration, yeah,

Carey 13:00
yeah. Like a field guide,

Lanny 13:01
yeah. So we were really inspired by, like, Audubon field guides and stuff like that. So that was, like, a big inspiration.

Jason 13:08
And now you mentioned that these plants, they each have certain characteristics about, like, where they can be planted, based on if they're evergreen or from Europe or in an herb garden or something. What other mechanics are there and like, what's the correlation between, like, the real world plant and the way that they encapsulate mechanics? It's like, if I look at a card and says, Oh, this card has this a mechanical effect. Can I see that in that plants? Like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Why this plant does that thing? I guess that depends on the plants doing something other than having a spot where you can put them.

Carey 13:38
I mean, at the core the game is it's a matching game, so it's like finding out in what season and what region you can plant a card. We do have cards that, when you plant them, they have special abilities when played, so they're not exactly related directly to the plant. It's just kind of an extra fun mechanic that it will give you, for example, stealing a card or maybe drawing an extra card, we have some really interesting additional mechanics that come into play with our expansion pack that is going to launch at the same time as the game, called invasive species. And that really gives you some more like plant specific things you can do. For example, with our base game, you're planting cards in your own garden. But with invasive species, you're going to be planting cards and other players gardens to try to sabotage or mess them up. And then they have abilities that will, you know, allow you to steal points or maybe make them have to skip a turn to, you know, clean the weeds out in their garden, or something like that. So they're really interesting mechanics that come up in the expansion. I think

Brian 14:40
I'll be honest, I'm very excited about the invasives expansion. I might have to get on Kickstarter so I can get the expansion with the base game.

Lanny 14:47
And the invasive is like, either, yes, I'm all in on, like, being an invasive chaos Gremlin, or some people are like, Oh, I'm here for, like, the kumbaya coziness. Of it all so, but it's fun, and nothing gets too mean. It is, like slightly devious, you know it is. It's not like you're derailing an opponent or or getting them off track. So, and sort of going back to Jason's question of like, the accuracy, all the regions of the cards are actually very accurate, and where we had to take some more liberal approaches with the mechanics are with the seasons that the plants can be played in. So not a ton of plants are growing in the winter. And as you all are aware, you know it just it ended up being really hard to keep the growing season, organic to real life growing seasons. So we depart a little bit from reality there. But every plant is growing where they can be growing. Every plant features a Latin name that's their real Latin name. Their real seasons are on there. Their real plant effects on there. So I would say a majority of it is fairly organic to what the real plant does in real life.

Jason 16:03
I always say, at least down here in the south, winter, gardening is a thing, but when I lived up North, it's like nope. Ground is literally frozen, so not gonna be able to do that.

Brian 16:12
Yeah, I'm getting ready to plant some wheat that I'll be overwintering. So we'll see how that goes. It's gonna be a pain in the butt to deal with, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I've done barley before,

Carey 16:12
yeah. What are you going to do with it?

Brian 16:12
With the wheat, I'm going to try to turn it into flour.

Carey 16:25
Ah, farm to table.

Brian 16:26
For the barley, that was for beer, which didn't matter as much if there was a little bit of grit in it, because it was going to get filtered. But for flour, if there's some sand in it, there's going to be sand in my bread. And I don't like that. So we'll have to see.

Lanny 16:38
Are you going like full bathtub brew for your beer,

Brian 16:42
not with the amount of barley I was able to grow,

Lanny 16:49
okay, yeah, more like a little container brew.

Brian 16:50
Yeah, it was like a gallon.

Jason 16:50
All right. So going back to your game, in addition to plants, I also saw you have historical botanists, like famous botanists who are represented in the game. And I was never since I didn't play the game, I didn't get a good idea of what their role is in the game. Can you tell us a little bit about, like, how you chose which botanists are represented, because it looked like it was there from all over the world. And like, what their role is in the game?

Brian 17:13
I recognize George Washington, Carver, for sure, and then,

Lanny 17:18
and maybe Carl Linnaeus, yes.

Brian 17:19
Yes, Linnaeus. Of course, that makes sense. Although Linnaeus had some funny ideas about how to name plants, I think there were some some interesting systems that were proposed for plants based on how many female and male parts they had.

Carey 17:32
Going back to your question, so we have, in the base game, we have eight different botanical specialists that you can kind of embody and play as and they give you bonuses at the end of the game based on what regions you use to plant your cards in. And so each botanist is kind of tied to a region or a region card. So George Washington, Carver, for example, is chef's garden, as he's famous for. You know, all of his work with peanuts, developing products and things like that. So for every plant you plant in chef's garden, and if you have the George Washington Carver specialist card, you'll get bonuses for that at the end of the game. And so Carl Linnaeus, he's, you know, I think Swedish. So he's from plants of Europe. And then we have others, Barbara McClintock, Ynes Mexia, Martin Cardenas, Agnes Arber. These are all kind of tied in some way to the region, and that's kind of how we came up with those. But we tried to get a broad representation of botanist because, I mean, maybe it is what it is, but it's just looking throughout history. It's just a lot of just white dudes that are looking to be botanist throughout history. And so we really want to elevate a wide variety of botanists.

Brian 18:43
Well, Jason is a Maize geneticist, so I imagine Barbara McClintock is sort of a patron saint of that.

Jason 18:48
Oh yes, yes. Always happy to hear when Dr. McClintock's name is mentioned. So another thing so you mentioned that you have a planned expansion about invasive plants. I also saw that you have an early backer award on Georgia natives, which I'm very happy about. I love native plants. I actually have a small native plant garden in like, the one spot in my yard that actually gets sunlight. So just curious, like, as much as you're willing to spoil, like, which plants did you pick to include in there? And why?

Lanny 19:16
we really wanted to focus on plants that grow really well in Georgia, or are very emblematic of Georgia. And so we've got the Cherokee Rose, which actually I did not realize until I was researching this. This is the Georgia's state flower emblem, but it's not actually native to Georgia. It grows well here, but I think it's actually native to Asia, if I could recall correctly. We're also did the flowering dogwood. We're both big fans of the Piedmont Park dogwood Festival, and the dogwood holds like a very special place to us as like, kind of the start of spring and a very. The Atlanta, Georgia emblematic plant. And then we tried to work on including a few others that were very important and special to Georgia, some some azaleas. And we also wanted to work with our VIPs, like the people that are coming in and backing them. So we did a few of them were. Here's a list of important plants to Georgia. What do you guys want to see in our expansion? Because they're the ones that are going to be getting it when it launches on Kickstarter.

Jason 20:31
Well, I'll put in my vote for American beauty berry. If that's not already on the list

Lanny 20:35
it is not wait. Tell me a little bit about American beauty berry.

Jason 20:38
Oh, it's, it's my favorite Georgia native. It's this big bushy thing. You can actually get pretty big, like six feet across or so. It's got these big leaves. The leaves have compounds that the Native Americans would use as, like, mosquito repellent, so you, like, crush it and rub it on your arms. But it's really pretty this time of year. So we're recording this in September, because it forms these big these clusters of bright purple berries on every node of the leaf. So you have this long stem going out, and there's just a ball of purple berries and then a gap, and then another ball of purple berries and a gap, and another ball of purple berries and a gap, and it just looks beautiful.

Lanny 21:12
They're such a gorgeous purple too. I just looked them up, and they look very tasty. Are they edible? Are they edible and not poison?

Brian 21:19
They are edible. They are not poisonous. They're one of those things that people use to make use to make jam or jellies, which you can assume probably means they're not very sweet,

Lanny 21:27
sure, a little astringent.

Jason 21:28
I've actually tried them. They basically taste like cardboard. They are not tasty. Berries. They are edible. You can't eat them, but there's no real pleasure in doing so,

Brian 21:39
we got to start working on improving the beauty berry, right?

Lanny 21:42
They are beautiful. So I see where they get their name. It has such a nice purple sheen.

Brian 21:47
One of my favorite invasives is the porcelain Berry. Have you seen that before?

Lanny 21:51
No.

Jason 21:52
Oh, those are also, unfortunately, beautiful.

Brian 21:55
Yeah, absolutely gorgeous fruit.

Jason 21:58
Yeah, it's like this beautiful, like teal, purple, metallic color. It's gorgeous, gorgeous. And then I look like, can I put this in my garden? Like, oh, it's invasive.

Brian 22:06
Well, you could put it in your garden, yes, but I'm gonna start an invasive garden.

Carey 22:10
It would do really well. Probably.

Brian 22:14
We'll just make the invasives compete with one another to see the we'll just find the most invasive among them,

Jason 22:20
yeah, if you need suggestions for invasive I have a long list of ones. I've been trying to get rid of rhizomatous, bamboo, privet, kudzu, Japanese bent grass,

Brian 22:30
Japanese honeysuckle.

Lanny 22:33
It was, sadly, all too easy to find a great list of invasive species. And as Atlanta residents, Kudzu is like, really, our star issue is our jumping off point.

Jason 22:44
It's like the poster child of invasive plants,

Lanny 22:46
especially in the South. In the southern United States, you can drive by and you're like, oh, that entire field, this entire mile of freeway, is just covered in kudzu.

Brian 22:57
the plant that ate the south.

Jason 22:59
so maybe kind of winding down, I've got a question for you all about general game design. So you mentioned that this is the first game that you're really taking all the way through development and production, and it's been a learning curve. So for any of our listeners who maybe also be thinking of going down that path, like, what are the major lessons you learned? Maybe, like, top two or three things to pass on to future people to help them along their path, or at least maybe spare them a little bit

Lanny 23:23
of pain. It's a really good question. And I mean, my first recommendation if you are at the beginning of the path is just to put pen to paper, or like, whatever that means for your game, stick things on dice, use pips to make your resources, because it is not going to come out of you perfect. And there was before I started making games, I was like, Oh, I like, need to come up with the full concept before I really, like start. And that is not true. You want to get something out and start, like playing around with it, because the game is going to evolve. I mean, our game Flora VISTA has evolved so much since we started. One of our original concepts was the amount of sun a plant can get was going to be some sort of factor or resource or something. And ultimately, as we started play testing it with ourselves and play testing with our friends, you learned. Okay, this is really fun. This is really important. This mechanic's not really working. This thing is a rule for one card, but it's not a rule for every other card, like, just drop it. There's just so much that you learn just by, like, taking the next step and putting it down. And then my other suggestion, which is not to dissuade anyone in any way, shape or form, is that it takes a while. It just, it sort of takes a while to really go from like concept to the end of the finish line. And Carey alluded to this when we started. We were like, this will be a project that we finish in a year. Here, and we're here three years later, and I'm, there are points where I'm like, Oh, it would have been great if we could have done six months, but that's just like, not even possible in any way, shape or form. You know, you've you've got to do Alpha prototyping, you've got to do beta prototyping. You want to get your actual prototype from the manufacturer that you're going to work with. Because, man, that was such a unique experience, because there were things that looked great on the computer that when we got it in, we were like, Oh, this just does not translate when we print. And so you want to really see it physically in front of you. And then we get to play with people like Brian and show it off to people, and get people interested and excited. So again, it is not to dissuade people in any way, but it is a longer process than you might think,

Brian 25:46
a marathon, not a sprint,

Lanny 25:48
exactly, exactly. And sort of when you can reframe that, it sort of makes everything better. Because at the beginning I was like, Oh, we blew through our one year goal right here. And at that point we were still, we were on, like, hand printed stuff that all had the same plant image that really confused everyone. Everyone was like, Wait, not everything is an orchid. And we're like, no, no, that's just a placeholder. We just have not figured out everything at this point. And so actually, our first prototype was on the back of the index cards. So it is, it's really evolved, and you've just sort of got to stay the course and and I think the last thing that I'm going to say is have friends that are willing to do it. And my sweet husband has played this game, probably, aside from Carey and I, more than any other person on this planet. And he is so sweet to like, keep on working through things. And, you know, one of the challenges we gave him at the beginning that he loved was like, how could you break this game? Like, help us figure out the ways in which, like, you know, you create a game to be balanced and replayable. But like, are there things we have not thought of that just totally break all of the core mechanics of the game, and that was a really great lesson too, on like, Okay, what actually doesn't work here and needs to be streamlined and improved.

Brian 27:09
Jason and his wife were my kind play testers, and Jason is an expert in breaking games it's his specialty.

Lanny 27:15
Thank you, Jason. We need you guys. You guys are as important as we are, because if you just create a game in a silo that no one's played, it needs to be played. It needs to be played so that it's smart and it's good and it's replayable.

Brian 27:30
You need your bug testers, basically, right, your people who are really putting it through its paces and trying to find those weird edge cases.

Jason 27:38
Yeah, we've heard from multiple creators that by the time your game is done, all of your friends and family should be absolutely sick of it and never want

Carey 27:44
to play it again. They probably are. I think one funny thing is, you don't necessarily think about is the rule book.

Brian 27:51
Oh yeah.

Carey 27:51
And you know, Lanny and I have played so many times we know how to play the game, and then we start to write down the rules, and we're like,

Brian 27:59
English sucks. That's the problem.

Carey 28:01
It's like, oh, well, we know how to play this game really well. But how do I yeah, how do I put this in writing so someone else understands? And that's a very different challenge that you run into. And then you also realize, oh, what actually are our rules? Like we change them up so often. Which ones do we actually want to go with? It forces you to make tough decisions about your game, you know, and that's when you rely on your play testers, too, because we ran into this a couple times, like you start designing the game for yourself, which is a fun thing to do, but Lanny and I, you know, we tend to like more medium like heavy games. And Flora VISTA was never meant to be like a really heavy strategy game that takes, you know, hours to play. And so we're like, oh, you know what we need to we need to think about our audience. Maybe, you know, cut back through the difficulty level a little bit, do some more play testing, see what works, and go from there. And, you know, look at other games for inspiration, honestly. Like, how do other games design their rule book? How do they handle the artwork. How do they do their marketing and promotion? Like designing games, that's the fun part. Lanny and I had a great time, I think, doing that, you know, starting out on business cards, iterating. I remember our Excel sheet I was working in Photoshop, and I'm like, I created this macro that would automatically, like, generate 300 cards for us, and we could easily print them out and make changes based on that.

Brian 29:22
Oh, wow.

Carey 29:22
But then you realize, okay, well, now we have to figure out how to produce this game, and then we had to figure out how to market this game. Other things we didn't think about about like, you know, we need a trademark for this game.

Lanny 29:32
There are a lot of different hats you get to wear. Yeah, you get to learn what you like and maybe what's a challenge for you. But it was, it's been really cool. I didn't know much about marketing before this game, and it's been a very interesting hat to wear.

Brian 29:46
I've got one more question I was hoping to ask Jason, did you have one more as well? I have one more, but mine's fast, so you go first All right. This is something I want to start doing when we get people on I'm taking inspiration from another podcast I listen to called monster talk. What are some of your favorite games with a Science or Nature theme? Do you have one?

Lanny 30:07
I love wingspan. I love the bird theme. In that I'm one of those people that reads every single bird fact that's on there. And I, I love the map that's on there. And I actually we really wanted to put a map on our cards too, of where it grows. And this was one of the things that we really learned while we were putting everything together. It's like too much information suddenly makes the card like too cluttered, and you can't pick out the information you really need. Pandemic is up there

Brian 30:39
two of our highest scoring games from the podcast. So I we agree with you on both of these.

Lanny 30:44
I like habitat.

Brian 30:46
Oh, we'll, write that one down. Don't know that one.

Lanny 30:49
I'm not thinking of the right game. I'm so sorry. I'm thinking of harmonies. Was what I was thinking of.

Brian 30:57
Yes, literally my favorite game of last year.

Lanny 30:59
Oh, fantastic. I really like Ark Nova. That's like an animal Zoo. And I love, I love a zoo, honestly.

Brian 31:06
So who doesn't love a zoo?

Lanny 31:08
Yeah, or an aquarium? Oh, gosh, our aquarium in Atlanta. Love that aquarium.

Brian 31:14
World class, world class,

Jason 31:15
yes. If you're ever in Atlanta and you can only visit one thing, do not go to the coke Museum. Go to the aquarium. It's much better

Lanny 31:22
100% and you've got to get here before

Brian 31:25
all the school groups,

Lanny 31:26
all the school groups, and before our last whale shark goes, we will not get any more whale sharks at the Atlanta aquarium, which is for conservation reasons. But the whale sharks are gorgeous, gorgeous, majestic creatures. And sadly, one of them just passed in the last few months.

Jason 31:45
Yeah, I heard that just old age, basically.

Jason 31:47
Yeah. What about you? Carey? I think all the games Lanny mentioned wingspan for sure. I'm thinking photosynthesis is a fun game.

Brian 31:55
Okay, I'm glad to hear that a lot of these games we've done before, so, like, we're not missing big parts of the area,

Carey 32:03
no. And there's a national park style game called trekking that I like to play. Lanny had a pretty good list. Only those are the only two I would add, I think,

Jason 32:11
all right. And then my question is, the mirror of that, what's your favorite plant, either in your game, or just in general?

Carey 32:17
I'll go within the game my favorite plants, the California Poppy that I mentioned earlier. And you can kind of see what some of our favorite plants are in the game based on how many points they're worth. So that's a five point card. That's the highest scoring plant in the game. And I think it's just really interesting. It can be, you know, it's technically edible. Indigenous people used to use it as kind of like a pain reliever, or like a mild sedative, which I think is interesting. It kind of reminds me of The Wizard of Oz thing, where Dorothy kind of falls asleep, even though that's not technically a California Poppy.

Brian 32:54
That's an Oz Poppy, a magical Poppy.

Jason 32:57
I always thought they were opium puppies, but in

Lanny 33:00
Oz, maybe, probably Oz is a weird place, yeah, but I

Carey 33:04
think it's just a beautiful plant overall. I love orange, and I think poppies do this thing where they'll close their petals at night, and it prevents, kind of like predators or pests from bothering it, and it kind of preserves energy. And that's a cool little future that a plant has

Lanny 33:21
in the game and maybe also in real life. We have a royal Fern card. I love ferns. I think they are so cool and unique, and they're like history on the earth is so unique. You guys probably know more than I do about the classification of ferns, but they are, they sort of function so different from a lot of other plants. I find that so interesting and that it's been around since like prehistoric eras, like is just so cool to me. And then within the game, one of our cards is the royal Fern, and I probably researched about three to five plant facts about every single plant in this game, and I found this one, and was instantly like, this is absolutely going in the game. In Slavic mythology, if you held royal Fern spore clusters, you were said to be able to slay demons and talk to plants. And why? Yeah, I know. And I'm like, Cool. I'm going out to get some royal Fern clusters immediately.

Brian 34:25
Yeah, you got all those demons to slay, right?

Lanny 34:28
Right? Exactly. I can live out my Buffy fantasy. I can be a real life druid. It's like, perfect. And I'd be like, a huge fantasy mythology person. So that one, just like, really spoke to me on a core level,

Brian 34:41
yeah, that sounds very D and D, we got to pull that into a campaign.

Lanny 34:44
I know, right, exactly,

Jason 34:46
all right. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there. Thank you both for coming on. If people want to look more into far out Fox games or Flora Vista, where should they go?

Carey 34:54
You can google Flora VISTA or go to Flora Vista.faroutfox.com and You can sign up for updates.

Lanny 35:01
Yep, and we are looking forward to our audience finding the game and backing us on Kickstarter and getting the game in real life. It's going to be a lot of fun. And thank you both for this interview. Thank you Brian for playing with us already,

Brian 35:16
absolutely

Jason 35:18
well, we're going to call it there. So thank you everyone for listening. Have a great month and happy games

Brian 35:23
and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya.

Jason 35:25
This has been the game of the Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to game in the science this podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games we talked about, we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Comment (0)

No comments yet. Be the first to say something!

S3E05.1 - FloraVista Creator Interview (bonus)

Summary

Timestamps

Links

Full Transcript