Flower Forest

The Story

This is my very first challenge scene. At the time, I was following a streamer and illustrator friend who set her community a creative challenge: a theme, a limited timeframe, a creation to present. I'd hesitated on the earlier ones, then I went for it. The theme of this one: flowers.

It spoke to me right away. I've always loved nature, organic shapes, pastel tones. There was a form of poetry in that theme, something I felt deeply aligned with. It became a peaceful, flower-filled forest, a soft and calm atmosphere.

It was also the first time I committed to a project whose timing I didn't control. I had to move forward, hurry, deal with the pressure. A new kind of exercise for me.

Under the Hood

I built the scene on Unreal Engine, modelling each asset individually in Blender: the grass, the flowers, the trees, one by one. I started with grass that was far too heavy on polygons, then refined it, flower after flower, tree after tree, until I had this forest.

After the hourglass of The Hourglass, it was another step up. I really had to push myself to get there, and it was an excellent modelling exercise.

Unreal Engine · Blender · Low poly modelling (assets built one by one)

The Wall

The wall was performance. For the very first time, I had to package a project, optimize it so it would run on the streamer's computer. And that was far from a given.

I faced every challenge tied to porting: getting the scene to run somewhere other than my own machine, without a bug or a crash breaking the immersion at the crucial moment. It was my first real confrontation with optimization and project distribution.

What I'm Proud Of

The result was, rather surprisingly, up to the task. But my greatest pride is what happened when the streamer discovered the scene live: the community's response was incredibly warm.

I received a wave of love stronger than I'd ever expected. Massive support, people telling me to keep going, people moved by what the scene gave off. For the first time, I was showing an audience what I could do, and the audience answered with heart.

What I Learned

The most important lesson, and it's a founding one: nothing beats feedback from people. It's incredibly motivating, incredibly uplifting. That live stream changed something in me. It showed me the power of sharing, and the bond that can form between a creator and those who follow them.

That friendship with the streamer, in fact, was born from that very moment, and it lasted.

Today

As such, this Unreal scene was a prototype, bounded by the frame of the challenge. But I always dreamed of coming back to it, of redeveloping it with more experience.

That's exactly what I did: my Flower Forest on Roblox was born from this scene. Turning it into a real game was my way of giving a nod to my community, to all the people who've followed me since that famous live stream. This forest is the root. The other one is its bloom.