Devlog #2: Lighting Befores & Afters

Hi everyone!

It’s been five months since our previous devlog, and we’ve spent them buried in working on Floralis. Today we’d like to take a moment to show what’s changed.

Let’s step out of the editor for a minute, shall we?

Early Levels: The Refinement Continues

The setting of Floralis is meant to exist in a very particular kind of tension: strikingly beautiful yet hauntingly dangerous. We want every environment to carry both feelings at once, like a cozy room you don’t want to linger in. Or a flower you’d rather not touch.

Our last devlog was about polishing the opening hour of the game. Since then, we’ve done several more passes on the game’s introduction to bring it closer to that vision.

Here’s a scene from the tutorial section. The old version was atmospheric enough but it was leaning hard into ‘spooky haunted house’ vibes:

We wanted more of the bloom. The sense that nature moved in, made this place its own, and didn’t really care whether you thought it’s spooky or nice:

Notice the improved lighting and the much denser foliage. Same room, very different mood. The new lighting work has been on our minds for months, impacting everything we’ve been working on.

Here’s another example from a bit later in Act I. You’ll recognize this section if you played our demo:

Our initial take on this room was warm and earthy, almost cozy. Which meant it was missing the sense of psychedelic beauty we want to be at the heart of Floralis.

The new version is several shades darker, full of glowing plants, with the lighting doing far more work to nail that psychedelic ambiance:

Each source of light — the bioluminescence of the hunter plants, the glow of the moon — slashes through the darkness of the jungle, illuminating your path but not making it any easier.

This is a visual motif we’re carrying through the whole game:

The Greenhouse Evolves

The deeper we go into sections we haven't shown in the demo, the bigger the changes get. Some of these areas have been almost completely rebuilt from the ground up.

Take the Greenhouse. A few months ago, it looked like this:

And here’s the same section now:

You can see what we’re going for: dense, layered planting, beams of light cutting through the space, a real darkness around the edges. There are far more plants filling out the room now but it's the new lighting setup that does most of the heavy lifting, creating an entirely different sense of ambiance.

We think the changes speak for themselves. The Greenhouse went from a space you walk through to a space you’ll stop and marvel at. Albeit briefly. The plants haven’t gotten any friendlier!

The Hands That Rock the Cradle

One of the most memorable moments from the demo has been the human hands lurking in the corners, trying to grab you as you run past:

While genuinely terrifying, they were distinctly human-shaped, and therefore not very plant-like. They ended up looking like they belonged in a different game, so we decided to rework them.

Our new take on this particular plant (and yes, it has always been a plant!) is far greener in nature, while still keeping the hand silhouette recognizable enough to make your skin crawl:

It's still something we're trying to nail down. Let us know what you think.

Wishlist Floralis

If you're enjoying the journey so far, please wishlist and follow the game so you don't miss future announcements (we’ll share some Act II content soon!). And don't forget that you can play the updated demo right now.

Floralis

If you've finished the demo, we'd love to hear what you think. Come hang out in our Discord and help us grow Floralis into something special.

Fun plant fact of the day: in the old Imerina kingdom of Madagascar, suspects were given the so-called Tangena ordeal, a poison brewed from the seeds of Cerbera manghas. If you survived, you were innocent. If you didn't, you were guilty (and dead). Roughly 20% of the population, or around 100,000 people, died this way.