About Follow the Butterflies

This game is Follow the Butterflies.

You’re in a bar. You order a drink. The more you drink, the more you think you’re seeing butterflies — and your goal becomes simple: catch all 10 before closing time. That’s the core loop.

If you’ve used any of the tools I’ve released, you might recognize the name Topic Creator. Every game’s theme can be boiled down to three words, and Topic Creator randomly picks those from a massive dictionary. For Follow the Butterflies, my spark came from these three:

Bartender. Decagon. Butterfly.

At first glance, they don’t go together at all — and that’s exactly why I love Topic Creator. You build the meaning.

Since I was hunting for the next minigame in my Glean series, here’s where the words took me:

Bartender – Easy. This story belongs in a bar or tavern.
Decagon – Trickier. A 10-sided polygon didn’t click right away, so I pivoted: what if it’s not a shape, but the number 10? Ten of something…
Butterfly – After riffing with Spruce (my AI partner in crime), the idea snapped into place: there are 10 butterflies in the barroom, and you have to catch them.

A lot more riffing happened (believe me), but eventually the vibe crystallized:

Night after night, the player drags themselves into the same bar, orders the same beer, and stares at the same spot on the wall. One evening, something flickers in the corner of their eye — something small, cyan, impossibly out of place.

With just enough liquid courage and absolutely no sense of self-preservation…
the hunt begins.

Concept Art + Tileset Inspiration

Starting a new game means diving into art direction — letting the ideas wander, collide, and sometimes run totally sideways. Here are the four pieces of AI-generated concept art that shaped the look and feel of Follow the Butterflies. I’ll be building the tilesets with my other tool, SpriteGrid.