Introducing Gardener Simulator!

Oh hey, all.

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Long time no hear. Well, first off, happy New Year 🥳

Now onto some real important stuff. Well, as the title suggests, we are making a brand new game!

Yes, it’s happening, and sooner than you might think, it’s almost time to get your virtual hands dirty.

Gardener Simulator is coming out this year. Not only that, it’s coming out Q1 of this year!

Yeah, that soon.

We started working on this game around July, making almost half of the features, but as we got burned out, decided to take a breather for a few months until New Year’s.

Now, since the New Year, we’ve already done so much! And can’t wait to share it with you.

Now what have we been up to?

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So, the title of the game does a good job of explaining what this game will be about, but how will it work?

Well, here’s the backstory.

You’re a depressed 30 something year-old living life on your couch, eating pizza, drinking beer every day. You despise your job, but it pays the bills, so you can’t complain.

Well, one day you saw a TV ad about a guy who started his own business, preaching how you can do it too.

So you take out your laptop, set your company colors and logo, and get to work. First, it’s a friend’s grandma, then a neighbour. And before you know it, you have a fully fledged business on your hands. All it takes is a bit of hard work and determination.

Let’s show it not tell it

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First of all, the most important thing about keeping a lawn looking nice is, of course, a lawnmower.

A lawnmower is a classic, first tool you get in the game, a tool used for mowing grass. Obviously, there are a lot of types of lawn-mowing tools. Some are easier, some are harder, but still, each depends on your playstyle (and money).

Okay, what else?

Well, when you’re mowing, obviously there’s a lot of grass left behind. You have to make sure you pick that up as well.

Well, how would one do that? Well, of course, with a leaf blower! Depending on which one you have and what you need to leaf-blow, it comes in really handy!

Now that is chaos, but we’re not done yet!

Part of the enjoyment of keeping your garden in check is precision. So take out your trusty trimmer and edge out your pathways.

And of course, no garden would be complete with hedges looking massively overgrown, so that’s what you have the hedge tool for. You can use it on any type of hedge you want!

When can we play it

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Well, most of the game is actually finished. Now, after our last game, we admit we are worried about burnout a lot more than before. Last time it hit us like a train, and it began to do so with this one as well.

We both have regular day jobs, so coming home after 8 hours of work and then working some more is a challenge you need to learn how to handle.

Another thing is planning. Our last game was a mess when it came to planning. We were never on schedule with anything because nothing was tracked correctly.

With this one, we wanted to make planning the main point of the process, and it panned out really well. Even though making the decision to stop development for a couple of months was difficult, we agreed it was the best decision at the time focusing on delivering quality over quantity.

Even with that hardship, we were actually quite quick with this project. (Development part incoming… You’ve been warned)

We actually cleaned up a lot of our projects and are determined to keep that up as much as possible.

We introduced submodules for each global mechanic, so all of the systems that can be shared among other projects are now actual packages that can be updated and maintained individually, separately.

This helps us speed up the development process a lot more and keep the rest of the project bug-free, since we know so many modules are individually battle-tested, so we don’t have to worry about them as much.

Steam Next Fest?

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We are planning on allowing you to play the demo on the Steam Next Fest on February 23, and the demo will stay up even after the game’s release.

The demo will be available probably a month before Steam Next Fest we’re planning to release the first demo at the start of February.

We are pretty much in the finishing touches of the full game, and the demo is pretty much ready!

We are confident in our ability to finish the game in Q1, but are unsure how much content we want to have fully complete before release, so we don’t want to give a specific release date.

Thanks so much for reading! We’ll be back with some updates from our latest playtesting, and to show off some more features we have in store for you guys.

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