Fashionista Art Stream: Gardener Garbs and Chatting! 🧣
Dear gardeners,
Our next art stream is a stylish one, and it will be focused on garbs for gardeners. Our streams are always a good time, full of fun conversations and whimsical chatter.
Come hang out with Louis Durrant and Fern on March 12 at 11 AM EDT / 3 PM GMT / 4 PM CET.
Winter Update - New faces: visitors, residents and a Gardener glow up! 🪴
Hello gardeners,
It’s been a while! Can you believe March is already here? Time sure flies! But it hasn’t gone by without tons of tweaks and work for The Garden Path! But before we dive into the game updates…
Thanks for 50,000 wishlists!
We’ve made it! The Garden Path is an indie game made with tons of care. Reaching this milestone means the world to our garden. Thank you all for your patience and support, this garden would not bloom without it!
Game Updates🗒️
Since we've arrived in 2024 The Garden Path has seen a number of quality-of-life tweaks and optimizations for the game to run smoother on particularly low-end hardware. But, that isn't to say there aren't a few new arrivals to look forward to.
Introducing: Aime! 🏕️
Aime has heard word that there's new gardeners afoot, and as adjudicator of the Goodly Green Gardens Society, he wants to see if your garden is up-to-snuff. Aime will visit just as your Garden comes into full bloom in the warmer weather
Quality-of-Life Feature Updates 🪓
The Designer can now be accessed from the dash, allowing you to make changes to your Garden without needing a contextual item or object to enter the mode.
Also, a new shovel indicator shows the plants that are small enough to unearth and move around the garden. You can also now scratch away the grass to create paths and flowerbeds.
Pinning the map has seen a revamp, allowing you to place as many pins as you'd like, as well as choosing an icon from a new dropdown menu that helps customise the reminder. Map pins will always appear while playing the game to the side of the screen, letting you know you are close.
New Vegetable Residents! 🥔
More residents have arrived in the Garden - say hello to Clair the potato, Theo the lemon, Grant the carrot, and Glenn - a fan favourite!
Fun fact: Grant is the first ever resident designed for The Garden Path back in 2018 - it's great to see them finally in-game. Just like all the other residents, you'll need to make sure the Garden meets certain requirements before they decide to call it their home. You might still catch them wandering around day-to-day.
Gardener Glow Up! 🌟
Those aren't the only new faces now in the Garden, there's new player faces too! A range of different features are now possible on the player model. This will be particularly important for multiplayer to help differentiate one another. When starting a new game, your determined face will be random, but there may be someone in the Garden you can talk to who can help roll that dice again.
Your usual reminder
And as always, here is your reminder that you can join our official Discord Community server, which you can join here. Here you can chat with the team, meet fellow backers, and help me shape The Garden Path. And of course, we encourage you to share your real-life gardening with your fellow gardening gamers.
Thank you all your patience and support, this garden would not bloom with out it!
Be Our Valentine? Art Stream: Cheesy Valentine Cards 🩷
Dear gardeners,
Love is in the air! And we'd love it if you joined us for sweet like a dream stream.🩷
Louis Durrant and Fern will draw cheesy valentine cards featuring the garden residents in a livestream taking place on December 12 at 10 AM EST / 3 PM GMT / 4 PM CET.
The winter weather settles in and 2023 draws to a close. Of course, this brings up the big question: Is The Garden Path still up for a 2023 release? As promised last month, we have an update to share with you to go over the ups and downs of the months past and months ahead.
When is the game releasing?
We are currently shaping the game to be the best it can be. The game's content is ready and waiting, however there are still some performance improvements to make before it’s ready for a full release, especially on Nintendo Switch. The Garden Path, while still a game about small moments, has grown to be a more mature project than I had imagined when I first started working on it years ago, and I want to be sure it gets its best chance when stepping out into the world.
With hopefully just a little further to go, I need just a bit more time to polish the game before everyone can get their hands on it so that you’ll be able to play The Garden Path in late Spring 2024. There’s also a new trailer to show for it!
I wanted to take the time to look back on The Garden Paths' development by wiping the dust off the old development blog. If you'd like to read more of my thoughts on the delay (as well as read about the game's development since 2018), you can check out my blog.
Thanks to everyone who’s been supporting my project for all this time, it’s wild to think how tall things have grown since the start.
And as always, here is your reminder that you can join our official Discord Community server here. It’s where you can chat with the team, meet fellow backers, and help me shape The Garden Path. And of course, it’s a great place to share your real-life gardening adventures with fellow gardeners.
Can you believe we're in the last month of the year!? Where has time gone...
In the spirit of the holidays, Louis Durrant and Fern will draw ugly holiday couture for the garden's residents in a livestream taking place on December 12 at 10 AM EST / 3 PM GMT / 4 PM CET.
Fall Update - New visitors, key remapping and more 🍂
Hello gardeners,
Long time no see! We’ve been working hard these past months, and have an update for our gardeners! Before jumping into the updates on features we’re working on, we want to answer your most frequently asked question:
When is the release date?
Finishing touches are still working their way into the game, so that time spent in the Garden is as enjoyable and as accessible as possible. But, while we're still polishing the game, you can expect more concrete news in the coming weeks! Growth can take time, and we really appreciate all of your support and patience during this process.
I have been hard at work on new features to help make The Garden Path a richer experience, like lost spirits who visit the Garden in need of help, and the highly-requested input remapping on keyboard. While we wait for the news later on this month, I thought I would take some time to go over a handful of these upcoming features to look forward to. Let's take a look!
Game Updates
As mentioned, there's a new kind of visitor now in the Garden. Spirits who have lost their way might be looking for harborage, but their worried thoughts will keep the Garden around them from growing, casting a dark shadow that surrounds them. By spending tones you can reassure the spirit and help send them on their way. You'll almost certainly want to head into the Garden and find the right herbs and botanicals to prepare for the encounter.
If you're having trouble finding the right plant, you can now track families of flora in your encyclopaedia, if you've recorded enough of that family. This way, when opening the map, you can see where hotspots of that plant are growing, and you'll know where to go when foraging.
The map itself has seen some love too, with new smaller pins that expand when highlighted, helping to make the map easier to read when objects are cluttered. The old information panel has been updated with new animations, and better groupings and explanations of what's going on in the Garden, to keep you in-the-know.
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A long-requested feature, input remapping, is now available for players playing with a keyboard. This is an early addition that will need more testing and ironing out, but I hope this sets things on the right track for control customization, especially for those who feel the default controls aren't intuitive or comfortable.
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A new algorithm determines what tasks a resident of the Garden might ask of you. By keeping a closer tally of what's growing in the Garden, and what you have on-hand, tasks that are delivered are no longer random. Instead, they are picked when the game believes the requirements of that task are within arms reach.
Resident errands are also no longer daily. Before, a random number of residents would opt to have an errand available, now available errands will come and go as you play in the Garden. If a new errand becomes available, it will appear in your Overview overlay, along with the character and where you can find them in the Garden to begin the task. Available errands will last a good while, but ignore them for too long and the resident might change their mind.
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A while ago I took the guesswork out from constellations by showing how the stars are connected from the beginning - as early player feedback suggested it wasn't fun guessing from all the stars which may or may not be connected.
But, more recently, playtesters felt they were missing the reveal of the constellation. Now, constellations will slowly form as you learn more about the stars. After observing a star, you'll also reveal what stars that star is connected to, hopefully piquing your interest for what you might unlock next.
And there's a bunch of new stars to unlock now too! A new type of star that glows green will help guide you through the content of the game when starting out. These stars are automatically tracked in your task tracker, filling up as you complete them, so you shouldn't miss out.
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Before, a large number of control options were either hidden, or dotted around inconsistent places of the UI, but a new global input guide will now follow the player and contextually list the actions you have available, whether you're running around the world, using your inventory, or whatever else.
The guide will also reposition and scale depending on what's open on screen, UI scaling for readability, and who’s playing, hopefully making the best use of screen real-estate.
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Finally, a push for optimization has been underway to help the game run and load faster on different systems. Thanks to a new way of grouping objects in the world, the game loads into the Garden twice as fast in testing, making The Garden Path even easier to hop-in for a minute or two, or maybe longer.
Hundreds of the game's textures have also been optimised to stream faster and be easier on RAM and GPU usage, which should be most notable on lower end systems.
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I really feel as though The Garden Path is maturing as a project and, from my time playing, these additions go a long way to make the game feel more consistent and readable, and that the Garden itself is more alive and wants to be explored. I’m excited to hear what new players think once they get their hands on it.
Usual reminders!
And as always, here is your reminder that you can join our official Discord Community server, which you can join here. Here you can chat with the team and help me shape The Garden Path. And of course, we encourage you to share your real-life gardening with your fellow gardening gamers!
