- Move the mouse to guide your creature
- Hold the left button to accelerate
- Red takes you deeper
- Blue brings you back up
- Fill your body to grow longer; + evolves a segment
- Move slowly to make smaller turns
- On a phone or tablet, touch and drag to steer
A game about being in the zone
flOw was Jenova Chen's thesis game at the University of Southern California's Interactive Media program, built with Nicholas Clark and scored by Austin Wintory. It was one of the games built for his thesis, Flow in Games: the idea that a game should keep each player in Csikszentmihalyi's flow zone, between boredom and anxiety, and that the player should be the one steering the difficulty.
So there is no menu and no difficulty setting. You are a small creature in a blue sea. Eat what's around you and you grow. Eat the red food when you're ready for something harder and you sink a level, where the water gets darker and the other creatures get bigger. Eat the blue food when it's too much and you float back up. Every player tunes the game to themselves without being asked to.
It was shown at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC 2006, and people played it a lot. "Addicting" was the word Jenova's fans used most. A year later the same idea, rebuilt by his new studio thatgamecompany, launched on the PlayStation 3. That studio went on to make Flower and Journey, Austin Wintory composed the music for Journey, and the blue sea on this page is where all that started.
You can read Jenova Chen's thesis, Flow in Games, on his site.
Why this launcher
- The copies on archive sites like archive.org don't work. They host the game's SWF on its own, but the game loads its levels (
levels.xml) and its music (41 MP3s) from files that sit beside it, and those aren't there. The game boots into a black sea with nothing to eat. - Jenova Chen's own flOw page still has a link to play the game, but it leads to a site which can't be reached.
- Every file the game needs is still on Jenova Chen's site. This page puts them back together, unmodified, so the game is playable again.
Make your own levels
Everything about a level lives in levels.xml: its colour, its size and what swims in it. Start from Jenova Chen's levels, change what you like, and play it above. Your level sets are saved in this browser only.
Tab types a tab. Press Esc, then Tab, to move on.
What the game understands
<Campaign num="1" player="Snakefish">- The game starts at campaign 1, which must come first. The last level's first creature carries a gold egg; eat it and you float to the top and hatch as the next campaign's
player(SnakefishorJellyfish). <Level bgColor="0x00BFFF" levelSize="400">- One level, in order from the surface down. The first level of campaign 1 is the title screen. The game has music for 20 levels; deeper ones are silent. Red food is added to every level but the last, and blue to every level but the first.
<SpawnFood num foodType hpMin hpVar>foodType0 to 5 picks the kind;hpMinplus up tohpVarsets its size.<SpawnFish>,<SpawnJellyfish>,<SpawnFlockfish>num numSegs maxSegs randEvolve segLength speedMin speedVar turnMin turnVar, andpanic="true"to make them flee.<SpawnManta>,<SpawnBoss>num numSegs segLength speedMin speedVar turnMin turnVar.<SpawnBillboard name posX posY>- Text in the water:
flowing_title,credits,tobecontinuedorwarning.
Credits
- Jenova Chen Producing, game design, engineering, visual art
- Nicholas Clark Game design, engineering
- Austin Wintory Sound design, music
flOw © 2006 Jenova Chen, all rights reserved. This is a fan tribute with no affiliation to Jenova Chen or thatgamecompany. The game files are hosted unmodified so the game can be played; if you are a rights holder and want them taken down, open an issue and they'll be removed. Played with Ruffle. Page by br3nt, source on GitHub.