Art of Fauna & Flora

Pigeon Post #9: Art of Flora, Travel, Updates and a Museum!

Well hello there! It now took me three full months to write another newsletter, and I’m very sorry about it. It was much busier than I wanted it to be, but things are finally calming down a bit, and I could take some time to talk about it all. So thanks for staying on the subscriber list! And who knows, maybe this newsletter even includes some exclusive puzzles for Art of Flora 😉

So without further ado, let’s start!

I launched a new app! Art of Flora, the botanical sibling to Art of Fauna, is out since March. The lead-up to the release took a lot of energy, but I’m incredibly happy with how it turned out. It was even featured in an article on the front page of Polygon, which I’m still very proud of.

I won’t get into too much detail about the app itself, but I want to take a minute to point out two specific things.

I think this is the most requested feature for Art of Fauna: giving credit to the actual artists behind the works. And while I fully agreed on adding it, I also knew that it is a lot of work, so I shifted it back and forth. But for Art of Flora, this was a non-negotiable feature.

Why is it so much work? Unfortunately, with those old books, you don’t always have the artist’s credit on the image, or even in the book. Sometimes you can actually find them if you do some digging. But then, if you have a name, details about them are sometimes sparse, and depictions of the person often don’t exist, which makes it hard to add sensible information to the app. And since I want to have a wide variety of drawings, I also have a bunch of different artists to credit. The 110 drawings in Art of Flora come from a total of 58 different artists. Many of them have profiles in Art of Flora, but not all of them yet. I promise they will be added in the future!

But even if it was a lot of work, I’m really happy that I did make these artist profiles. Not only did I learn a ton about incredible people, I also just love looking at this gallery view (which was inspired by a portrait gallery in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna).

First of all, I cannot really take credit for any of it. As for Art of Fauna, I again hired the amazing Josh Mobley to do all the sounds for Flora. This time, I wanted to have something lighter and more fragile, like a beautiful flower.

And while Josh is an incredible musician, I am extremely bad with expressing what exactly I want. So it was a very long back and forth until we found something that I was happy with. I think we only finished a couple of days before the release. But in the end, the sounds that Josh made are just delightful. I can’t add a sample here, so please just download the app and give it a listen!

But these sounds also solve a problem I have with Art of Fauna. Since players not always find the correct spot for a tile on their first try, they might hear the same pickup sound multiple times in a row and get annoyed by it. Josh came up with a simple but brilliant solution: Every of the 24 pickup sounds has actually four variations that have a slightly different pitch. And every time you tap on it, another one is played. So the whole app feels like playing an instrument. I. LOVE. IT.

If you haven’t downloaded Art of Flora yet, you can do it under the following link:

And yes, the artist profiles will come to Art of Fauna as well. I just didn’t have time yet to actually work on it. The plan is to add it with the second season, but we will see about this!

Speaking about new content…

April was much busier than I anticipated when it came to updates. But we had a few special celebrations that I just had to do updates for. Let’s break them down one by one:

The April Fools’ joke was a special one. A friend of mine gave me the idea to add cryptids (animals that are not actually real) to Art of Fauna months ago. But of course, there are no historical images of those animals. So I had to find another way of pulling this off. And the solution was in dinosaurs!

Last time, I told you I hired Gustavo Monroy to make dinosaur content for Art of Fauna’s second season. But that was only half of the truth. I also hired him to do the art for the cryptids. And I truly love the result.

I definitely want to add more cryptids in the future, so please let me know if there is any creature you want to see in the app!

Now for Easter, I wanted to extend the Easter Egg hunt in the app, so I added three new puzzles for three incredible birds. While I added three puzzles, I initially hid two eggs inside the app, which some of you discovered within the hour of its release. I’m still sorry that this happened; one shouldn’t do updates in the middle of the night! But I hope you still had fun playing these new puzzles.

Finally, we had Earth Day on the 22nd of April. Art of Fauna got an extension to the Echoes of Extinction puzzle package, while Art of Flora got this “Fragile Futures” package, highlighting plants that are endangered but not extinct quite yet. I hope you enjoyed them!

Now lets turn to something completely different!

What made my time schedule a bit more complicated was that I was also invited to speak at two conferences at the end of March and the start of April, respectively. So in March, I travelled to Shanghai, China, to speak at LetsVision  about my approach to how I built Art of Fauna and the values it stands for.

A couple of weeks later, I gave the same talk in a slightly shorter form at trySwift! in Tokyo, Japan! If you are interested in the talk itself, you can watch the recording from Tokyo right here:

This is still a bit insane to me. Since my childhood, I always dreamed about visiting Japan. But I would have never thought that building a game like Art of Fauna would actually lead to me being invited there and experiencing the country. Really speechless and thankful about that. 🫶

I also spent some extra time around the conferences to explore the cities a bit, but also to do some research for future packages for both Art of Fauna and Art of Flora. I went to multiple exhibitions with Japanese and Chinese zoological and botanical art, so I now have better knowledge of how to make puzzle packages honouring these countries and their artists. I even almost bought the most gorgeous book I’ve ever seen in my life at an antique store in Tokyo, but spending 3,000 euros on something that should be put into a museum didn’t feel like the most sensible way to spend my money. So I ended up buying these two books for research.

Here are some more photos from Shanghai and Hangzhou in China.

And from Tokyo and Kamakura in Japan!

But things didn’t slow down just yet, because while I was in Tokyo, I helped to finish up the last touches to something very, very special. And that is...

Yes, Art of Flora is now hanging in a museum! But how, why, and where? Let me explain!

Graz has something that is called a Universal Museum, the Joanneum. It’s like a museum with multiple locations, which includes actually 20 different museums, from a modern art museum, to an archaeological museum, an open-air museum, and also one for natural history.

Last year, they announced a combined topic called Bloom, all about flowers and plants. I saw their press conference about it on social media when I was knee-deep in the development of Art of Flora. Since I love the Joanneum, I thought it would be worth a shot to reach out.

So I wrote an email to the natural history museum asking, if there is any chance to collaborate. And to my surprise, they were as excited about the proposition as I was. They actually wanted to do some interactive part in the exhibition anyway, and Art of Flora was a perfect fit.

So we agreed that they would come up with a special puzzle package that you could only play on an iPad in their exhibition. The exhibition is called Blümchensex (literally Flower-Sex), about the pollination and distribution of flowers. The title works better in German, as Blümchensex is an actual slang word. But I won’t get into more details here. 😅

Anyway, I also had the idea that people could take a part of the exhibition back home with them. So next to the iPad is a QR code that you can scan to unlock these 24 exclusive puzzles in Art of Flora. They are actually unlocked automatically for anyone who lives in Austria also as a way of promoting the exhibition.

On the day I landed back home in Graz from Tokyo, the exhibition officially opened. So here is a picture of a very very tired but super proud Klemens!

I also made a short video about this whole story, which you can find Instagram, TikTok, or on YouTube.

Now, I know not everyone is able to travel to Graz to visit the exhibition. So, as a special gift to all of you Friends of Fauna, I wanted to give you special access to these puzzles. You can unlock them by clicking on the following link on the device where you have Art of Flora installed. Just please keep the link to yourself, so don’t share it with anyone else!

And that’s it for today! I’m on the train right now to Copenhagen because my fiancé is crazy enough to run the marathon there, and we will do some deserved vacation afterwards. But when I’m back, I will throw myself into making Season 2 of Art of Fauna happen.

Oh, and finally, since I did send it out now on the 8th of April 2026, I have to take a second to say: Happy 100th, Sir David Attenborough 🎂

But thats now really it. Thank you so much for reading and your continued support! Until next time!

Klemens 🦆

PS: As always, if you love Art of Fauna, then please take a minute and leave a review on the App Store. This helps a lot with getting found by other people.

Thanks! 💚