Indie Game Focus: Hanako’s Flower Shop

We had the pleasure of interviewing the creator of Hanako’s Flower Shop!

1. How long have you been creating games?

Personally I (Vsevolod Metelskyi) have been working as a game developer for a bit more than 4 years working on a variety of mobile and PC-oriented games as well as some smaller AR and VR games\experiences. Working on games, designed by someone else has always been pushing me in the direction of creating something on my own. So me and my two friends created a small indie team called FantaJI and started developing our very first game – a wholesome visual novel called “Hanako’s flower shop” which has been in development for the last 2 years. By the way, we have recently released a free demo with full voice over here in Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1529640/Hanakos_flower_shop… Check it out, you won’t regret it!

2. Can you tell us about Hanako’s Flower Shop?

Sure! “Hanako’s flower shop” is a wholesome visual novel with some resource management elements which features a unique bouquet arrangement mechanic based on the language of flowers. Most of what defines the visual novel genre is the purely text-based approach, meaning a player won’t have to do much except for reading the story (which works just fine if the story is interesting). While incorporating this element of the genre, “Hanako’s flower shop” also has other mechanics such as the above-mentioned bouquet arrangement and flowers gathering (we have a couple of ways to do this that are different gameplay-wise). “Hanako’s flower shop” tells a story of a young girl Hanako (Hanako can literally be translated as “A little flower” or “A flower child”) who is taking over a duty to run a flower shop passed to her from her grandfather. She has been preparing for this for her whole life, so she cannot wait to start yet when she actually starts she realises, that the job requires understanding of not only flowers, but also people, their thoughts, problems, desires and motivations. Through interacting with a whole variety of different customers, Hanako gets more experienced at her job as a florist and also gains a set of life lessons which shapes her thoughts and views. The game is scheduled to be released in fall 2022 on Windows, macOS, Linux featuring full text and voice localisation for English, Japanese, Russian and Ukrainian.

3. Where can others support your work?

The best way to support us would be to spread the word about the game! Play the demo and if you enjoy it tell your friends about it! If possible, also fill out our little survey that is in the end of the demo. It’s pretty short and does not require you to type.

4.What inspires you when creating a game?

“Hanako’s flower shop” is a very personal story. A lot of episodes you will see in the game are based on real life events. Of course, names, places and some circumstances are different, yet the core is still strongly tied to our own person life experiences. So what inspires us is the desire to share our memories about childhood, the sweet and innocent taste of youth and overall bittersweet taste of life.

5.Plans for 2022?

The number one plan is to release a full version of “Hanako’s flower shop”! Then to analyse what did right and wrong, get some new people for the team and start a new project which is quite likely to be very different from “Hanako’s flower shop”.

—

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Need coverage? Please send an email to [email protected]