Hi, everyone!

My name is Lorraine – I am a Game Designer for stillalive studios and was the Narrative Designer for Garden Life. Today I’m going to share with you a little bit about the inspiration for and development of the characters you can find in the game.


From the moment they were created, we knew we wanted Robin to be the most connected character to the garden. We also knew early in development that we wanted to create a sense of wonderous magic, a sense of exploration, optimism, and excitement.

Robin, being so connected to the garden and the world, had to feel those things as a way to invite the player to feel them too. Inspiration for such a character came from the positive aspects of characters in children’s adventure stories: Alice from Alice in Wonderland (which we were already very inspired by), Digory and Polly in The Magician’s Nephew, or Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Growing up reading these stories, these characters were not just adventurers but daydreamers and optimists who saw aspects of the world other people didn’t – something that really became a core part of Robin’s identity and their drive to make the garden a place their friends could lay down their burdens for a while.


The inspiration for Leslie was incredibly easy. In 2020, I sadly lost my grandmother and hadn’t had the opportunity to honor her the way I wanted to, so when I joined the Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator team and learned there was to be an elderly female character of some kind,

I didn’t think twice about injecting my memory of her into the game. Leslie quickly became positive and encouraging, and hopefully makes the player feel as though she has their back no matter what. Her love of toads comes from my Granma too, whose house is still full of frog statues and pictures from all across the world.


Laurie was a difficult character to write at times. We knew from the moment we created Robin that they were going to be a ghost, which of course meant they had passed away. I wanted the player to interact with Robin’s loved ones to highlight what Robin wanted the garden to be, so it only made sense to include a sibling among the cast. Even in the cozy and largely joyous experience that Garden Life is, it felt wrong not to honor the pain Laurie must have felt at Robin’s passing, and that sadness made her stand out among the cast as “the saddest”. To balance that a bit, she developed a stoicism that I think has become a uniquely British stereotype: Keep Calm and Carry On.

For Laurie though, this was drawn from the same place I draw from in times of trouble – not a need to be strong or tough, and definitely not just for other people’s benefit, but a wish to claim back some control against something that might otherwise spiral far more unhealthily.


Jasmine is my favourite Garden Life character. She is bold, strong-willed, wonderfully creative and deeply passionate; traits I admire and see in a lot of creative freelancers in the modern age. They are, effectively, where Jasmine’s origins began: someone who has to work far too hard just to get by, even if she recognises that as unreasonable, but is still willing to give everything she has to everything she does.

Perhaps it’s a bit of wishful thinking from me that she can do this without taking her foot off the accelerator pedal at any point, while also being a great friend to both Robin and Laurie. It should be noted too that her response to Robin’s passing is deliberately more proactive than Laurie’s, part acting as a tonal counterbalance and part validation that there are many ways to grieve.


Marcus as a character didn’t have a direct inspiration. The foundation of his personality was built from a wish to give Jasmine a loving and fiercely dependable partner who was as driven and hard-working as she became over the course of her development. The icing on the cake of Marcus’s character was his love of magic, fantasy and the fantastical.

The story he tells when you complete the dragon Pavilion statue (Nightshade, who is awesome!) is – once again – inspired by my Granma, who alongside her frogs had many a fairy, toadstool, or dragon statue in her home when I was growing up, just like Marcus’s.


Frank began his existence as a less hands-on Gandalf. He is probably the character who went through the most iterations over the course of development. I think this is based in the fact that his was one of the last concept arts to be created, and until we saw him, it was harder to nail his exact personality down.

After that, he became an elderly uncle of sorts; always a solution to every problem, always an alternative way to look at a situation. We had long before established he would be very health-and-fitness focused and would run the local gym – when I saw his artwork for the first time, that almost became a playful subversion of audience expectations. Let’s be honest. He doesn’t look the part. And somehow that makes it all the more perfect.


We had long loved the idea that one of the characters you could meet in Garden Life would be responsible for making some of the decorations you could use in your garden, but it was a while before that character became Ema.

In a way, she is a narrative foil for Jasmine’s more chaotic youth, but she was originally more of a meta character than she developed into; the one character constantly questioning the slightly weird and fantastical elements you’ll find the longer you play the game. Tonally, that became less and less important as work went on, which left Ema a wonderfully simple character to write.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into the characters of Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator – they are a fun and quirky bunch who will long hold a special place in my heart. Of course, there is one more character in the game that I can’t and won’t take any responsibility for, and that’s you!

I hope you understand when I say that Robin, Leslie, Jasmine, Laurie, Marcus, Frank and Ema cannot wait to meet you and are very excited to see what you do with the community garden.

Much love, take care and – most importantly – have fun!
Lorraine and the whole team at stillalive studios 🌼

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Dear Players,

We're having a run at the moment! We've just set a new patch live with the following enhancements and fixes! You will notice things we got a lot of feedback on and we could pack into our short timeline. I hope you'll like it!

• Missing icon for 'keeping stock' tutorial mission fixed
  
• Dark and pale pink amaryllis seeds are now consistent
  
• Seasonal secateurs now cut with continuous behaviour and fixed SFX
  
• Time of in game day extended
  
• Time is paused whilst in a menu
  
• Crafting now uses items from inventory

Thank you again for your patience.

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

Garden Life Facebook[www.facebook.com]Garden Life Twitter[twitter.com]Garden Life Instagram[www.instagram.com]Garden Life Discord[discord.gg]Nacon TikTok[www.tiktok.com]

Hello fellow green thumbs!

Once again, we'd like to thank you for all your feedback. We're still working hard to try fixing the problems you may have, but it's great to see your stunning garden screenshots!

Today a new patch is being released, fixing the bug when buying the winter fences and causing the game to crash. We are also adding the continuous cutting when you keep holding the button: no more spamming!

• Winter fence crash fixed
  
• UI crash when opening fast fixed
  
• Cat has run off home from the outside of the garden
  
• Holding the use button with the cutting tool allows for continuous cutting
  
• Additional rucksack slots are now functioning as normal in creative mode

You can expect more fixes coming in the coming weeks!
Thank you again for your patience.

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

Garden Life Facebook[www.facebook.com]Garden Life Twitter[twitter.com]Garden Life Instagram[www.instagram.com]Garden Life Discord[discord.gg]Nacon TikTok[www.tiktok.com]

Hello fellow green thumbs!

Thank you for all the feedback on the Steam forums and our Discord server. We're gathering your input and ideas!

Today we're happy to release our first patch for the game. It focuses primarily on issues you reported that block gameplay. Crashes, blocked flower statues, and also some additions we could add to the gameplay like a bigger bag. Read about the details below.

Thank you for enjoying Garden Life and sending us feedback for the game!

• More bag space
  
• Fix to dragon floral statue so it does not block the throne statue
  
• Fixes to chinese Localization
  
• Video for steam deck now working
  
• Updated Size UI in the flower stand
  
• Stopped the summer tool sound in the distance when it's raining
  
• Replaced clock ticking sound in shed
  
• Moisturise me achievement fix
  
• Achievements now trigger after the end of the day
  
• Achievements now trigger that were gained / are gained in the market place

You can expect more fixes coming in the coming weeks!
Thank you again for your patience.

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

Garden Life Facebook[www.facebook.com]Garden Life Twitter[twitter.com]Garden Life Instagram[www.instagram.com]Garden Life Discord[discord.gg]Nacon TikTok[www.tiktok.com]

Dear Gardeners!

While we're still working on the first patches, the first of which should arrive on PC this week, we'd like to tell you more about the technology we've put in place to develop flowers and plants in Garden Life.

Enjoy your read!


It’s a cold day in November 2023. The developer team at stillalive studios in Innsbruck, Austria, are working on the release candidate of Garden Life. Garden Life is a cozy gardening simulator. A game about planting flowers, enjoying them grow and decorating the garden to your heart’s content. With a deep focus on non-punishing gameplay, a light story, and a stunning, animé inspired art style.

At stillalive studios, we take pride in our expertise in simulation games and their underlying technology. As we started fleshing out the idea of a gardening game, we thought it should be easy enough for a company that has people with a degree in quantum physics. But could we create a gardening game that hid all the simulation complexity and love for data structures under a cup of warm tea on a cold winter’s eve?


It all starts with Kay, our producer. She’s the one that manages the Garden Life project at stillalive. Kay knows a lot about flowers as she was a proper florist in her past professional life. Putting together flower arrangements for festivities and weddings. For her craft, Kay won prestigious Gold and Silver medals at the world’s famous Chelsea Flower Show in London. This knowledge had to be put to good use in a cozy gardening game. With her on the team, we had one of the puzzle pieces down.


Computers are not very good at randomness: the little quirks and irregularities that make nature so diverse and interesting. When artists create 3D models, the computer is always going to re-create those models exactly. Identical copies down to the vertex. We couldn’t imagine anything less cozy than a garden full of identical storm troopy flowers, growing in lockstep. And this is where our tech department set out to find ways of breaking these patterns. Adding randomness and quirks back into the cold determinism of computer processors.

Flowers often only play a background role in games. With grass and flowers only being represented as quick texture shaders or 2D images to please peripheral vision. But in a gardening game, flowers are front and center. They need to look stunning. One of our design goals was therefore to make every flower look unique. So much so that a full garden of flowers would look natural, as in real life. No copies. No storm troopers. No tricks.

Early tests from our plant growth system.


Looking at above growth animation it becomes clear our flowers are not static 3D models. Every flower model is generated on-the-fly. Follow the algorithm / recipe:
- It starts in the ground, where the first stem segment is generated and grows.
- When the segment is finished, a new segment is spawned.
- The growth direction for the new segment gets a kick in a random direction so the stem does not grow in a straight line.
- At every new segment and depending on the flower, there is a random chance that a leaf grows out of the stem. Or the stem splits up into 2 segments.
- The more segments the plant spawns, the bigger the chance to produce the final flower at the top, finishing the growth process.
- Depending on the flower type, the top gets another kick in a random direction for good measure.

This simple recipe allows for so much variation and produces organic, beautifully looking flower beds. Every flower has leaves at different places. Some stems are shorter, some longer, with random variations in growth direction here and there.

Behind the scenes look at our flower growth system.

To realize the variety of flowers we have in the game, every specimen has a slight variation of this recipe. How big and long are the stem segments? How straight, interwoven? How many segments can there be, determining the total height of a plant. And while sunflowers grow very tall and have one stem, Hellebores grow in small bunches, and Roses go all-in on the bushy, entangled structure.

As mentioned above, computers are not very good at coping with randomness. While there are tricks to make hundreds of identical models run smooth on today’s GPUs, with high frame rates and all, it was a long and winded road to optimize performance for on-the-fly generated 3D geometry. We’re very happy with the outcome! Together with our animé inspired art style, Garden Life simply looks gorgeous and promises many hours of relaxing gameplay.

Our natural garden.

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

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Dear players,

Today we have big news for Steam players: cloud saves are now available! If you play on two machines (PC/PC or PC/Steam Deck), you'll have now to choose the save you want to keep.

Before making your choice, press windows + R on your keyboard and enter the following: %localappdata%\GardenLife\Saved\SaveGames, and copy/paste your saves to a safe place, in case you lose them.

Be careful, the choice is final and irreversible.

At the same time, we're continuing to pay close attention to all your feedback, and in particular to problems linked to crashes and various major bugs, and we're working on a first patch which should arrive shortly.

Many thanks for your patience.

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

Garden Life Facebook[www.facebook.com]Garden Life Twitter[twitter.com]Garden Life Instagram[www.instagram.com]Garden Life Discord[discord.gg]Nacon TikTok[www.tiktok.com]

Dear gardeners,

In 2 hours, you'll be able to attend Nacon Connect 2024, our annual publisher conference bringing fresh insights on various games and unannounced projects. Garden Life will be present!

Let's meet tonight at 07:00 PM CET (19:00 Paris time) / 10:00 AM PST on Twitch[www.twitch.tv] or Youtube. to know more.

Don't miss the call!

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

Garden Life Facebook[www.facebook.com]Garden Life Twitter[twitter.com]Garden Life Instagram[www.instagram.com]Garden Life Discord[discord.gg]Nacon TikTok[www.tiktok.com]

Dear Gardeners!

Garden Life has been available for 5 days now, and we'd like to thank you for your incredible support.

After months of development, it's just incredible to see the project come to life in the hands of players, and the team at Stillalive Studios or Nacon is very proud to see you enjoying and relaxing on the game!

We've taken note of all your feedback on social networks, Discord and Steam. Naturally, we'll need to carry out a full analysis to see what solutions we can provide, and in what timeframe.

We are looking into the most pressing issues like crashes first so you can play the game uninterrupted.
Other feedback we have gotten and that we forwarded to our development team is: inventory sorting, pruning process, days being too short, plant limits and more.

Note that a solution can already correct some crashes by forcing the game to launch with DirectX 11. Here's how to do it:
- right-click on Garden Life in your Steam library
- click "Properties..."
- go to "General" tab
- in the "Launch Options" field write "-d3d11"

A FAQ is also available on the forum: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1915380/discussions/0/4340977379960931230/.


We'll keep you posted on the progress of the fixes, but in the meantime, don't hesitate to share your feedback with us!

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

Garden Life Facebook[www.facebook.com]Garden Life Twitter[twitter.com]Garden Life Instagram[www.instagram.com]Garden Life Discord[discord.gg]Nacon TikTok[www.tiktok.com]

Dear Gardeners!

After hard months of development, Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator is now ready to welcome you into its warm and colorful world. Whether you are a green-fingered expert, nature lover, or gamer looking for a new "cozy" world, you are sure to enjoy this game concept where nature and a passion for flowers take centre stage.

Design your ideal garden with the variety of plants and ornaments available, and then expand it as you see fit using the various unlockable structures. Plant your seeds wherever you want, and set up pathways and decorations to create the ideal garden. Our specially developed growth simulation technology ensures that each plant thrives independently while adapting to its surroundings. There are over 120 plants (including color variations) and 245 ornaments to discover, allowing you to express your creativity.

Check out the Launch Trailer on YouTube:
Buy the game now:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1915380/Garden_Life_A_Cozy_Simulator/

For the full FAQ, check the FAQ post on our Steam forums. Be careful, the FAQ can contain minor spoils.

What is Garden Life?
Garden Life is a relaxing gardening game in which you create your dream garden in a peaceful, colourful world.

Is Garden Life a real gardening simulation?
No, we took inspiration from real life gardening and created a cozy game simulating the rewarding parts of gardening. Flowers bloom much faster than in real life and are not affected by changing seasons, even winter.

Is the game Steam Deck compatible?
The game is fully playable on Steam Deck, but some numbers and letters might appear small.

Is a Mac version planned?
There are currently no plans for a Mac version of Garden Life.

Can I play with other players? Join our friends' gardens?
Unfortunately, Garden Life wasn't originally designed as a multiplayer game, so you can't join up with friends or visit your friends' gardens.

Is any DLC planned after the game's release?
Two DLCs are available on all platforms. There are no current plans for further DLC content after the release, but we'll let the players if that changes in the future. You can susbcribe to our official newsletter to keep up with all future news on our website: https://www.garden-life-a-cozy-simulator.com/

How do I use the photo mode?
When playing, the key to press in order to get access to the photo mode is displayed at the top of your screen.

Can we date the characters?
There is no dating in this game.

Are there seasons in the game? Can you skip them?
There are four seasons to experience in Garden Life, each lasting 30 in-game days. In the creative mode, they can be changed instantly. There are no adverse effects on the plants in different seasons, but you will notice different items in the shop, different customisation options for the garden fence, and a difference in the price of certain bouquets when you sell them in your stall.
In story mode, you can't skip seasons. In creative mode, you can go into the shed and change the season by selecting the pictures just underneath the clock.

Can I customize the decorations?
There is a brush you can purchase from Leslie's shop that can change all of the placeable decoration's colors.

How do we get new seeds and decorations?
Seeds can be gained from a few ways: purchased from the shop, harvested from established plants, or given as a reward for a request or mission.

How do we get new seed colors?
When a plant is ready to harvest, you will have a small light (VFX) coming from them. This will indicate a new seed. If the VFX is green, the seed will be the same colour as the plant you are harvesting from, and if it is a pink, the seed will be a different colour as the plant you are harvesting from. In creative mode, all colours are available from the start in the shed.

Can we extend the garden? Can we unlock the garden? How do I unlock the new zones?
In story mode, play through the game by completing missions and requests for the characters. Once available, use the customisation board at the entrance of the Garden to unlock new areas.

How do we know a plant can climb? Why is my climbing plant not climbing?
In the plant book inside the shed: you can see the type of plant you have (normal, bush or climbing plant). Climbing plants are: Ivy, Clematis, Morning glory and Jasmine.
Make sure you have placed the plant close to an item that has height (such as a trellis or fence). Cut the top of the plant and check back: climbers can be tricky to get to take, so regular pruning is required.

How do I know my plant is infected?
You will see a small cloud of black flies and hear a buzzing in the location of the infected plant.

How to get rid of pests?
You can get a pest removal spray for free in Leslie's shop.

Can I move a plant?
You are able to move plants with the trowel tool which you can purchase from the shop.

Can we pet the cats?
You can pet two cats in the garden and one cat in Leslie's shop.

How do I get to the village?
You can access the vilage by clicking on your bike, clicking on the Village Square sign, or walking to the end of the road.

How to get rocks? How to get sticks?
Rocks can be found at the start of your game in your garden and then, to get more stones and sticks, you will need to use the shop. You can craft large rocks into smaller ones at the crafting bench in your shed.

Where can I sell things? How do I unlock the stand / stall? Can I sell my bouquets?
In story mode, play through the game by completing missions and requests for the characters. You will eventually unlock a stall in the village's square where you can sell cut flowers and bouquets.

How to open the Greenhouse? Do I have to water my plants in the greenhouse?
In story mode, play through the game by completing missions and requests for the characters. You will eventually unlock the Greenhouse by paying for repairs and garden cleaning on the board at the entrance to your garden.
There is an auto-watering system in the greenhouse.

How to get new seeds?
In creative mode, you have access to all seeds of all colours in the shed from the start of the game. Seeds can also be bought for free from Leslie's shop.

Do I have to take care of my plants?
You still have to take care of your plants.

Is there a way to delete everything?
There is no way to delete everything, but you can start a new save in creative mode.

How to change seasons?
In creative mode, you can go into the shed and change the season by selecting the pictures just underneath the clock.

How to report a bug?
To report a bug, you can contact us here: https://garden-life.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb

Warm whishes,
The Garden Life team 🌼

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