Publisher: Liam Allen-Miller
Developer: Liam Allen-Miller
Release Date: August 10th, 2022
This article is the first of a multi-part series on the development of Garden Guardian. Stay tuned for the next part!
For anyone interested, Garden Guardian is currently half price on PC and Switch for the week of its third anniversary! Check it out at https://linktr.ee/gardenguardian
In 1999, my mum and I stopped in at a Toys ‘R Us somewhere in Quebec. I can’t fully remember all the details of the event, but what I do remember is that she knew I had come to enjoy video games quite a bit, and it was time for me to get a Game Boy of my own. It was around my birthday, I think, so sometime in July. I remember that we made our way to the huge R-Zone branded video space in the front corner of the store, where the racks of games stood at least a solid foot taller than I did. I vaguely recall noting that the N64 demo station had been left mid-Mario Party by storegoers who evidently had more important things to do, but also that I didn’t have the time to end Mario and co’s trapped-in-the-mid-game state.
We circled the Game Boy section a few times and walked out of the store with a brand new Game Boy Color (atomic purple, of course) and a copy of Game & Watch Gallery 2. I seem to remember the “5 GAMES IN ONE” bulletpoint on the cover of the box being read aloud in some capacity, so I hesitate to say it played a part. It’s been almost exactly twenty six years since that fateful trip to Toys ‘R Us, and exactly three years since the release of my first commercial game, Garden Guardian.
Since childhood, making games has been a longtime goal of mine. Nintendo consoles have always meant a lot to me as well, so when I think about Garden Guardian and its subsequent Switch release, my heart sometimes swells with pride that I managed to do it. Even if my path was slow and circuitous, I eventually got there. Ever since Garden’ Guardian’s original release, my head has swarmed with thoughts about what worked, what went wrong, and how I got here. Today, I’d like to take a go at putting those thoughts to paper.
Firstly, I just want to tackle the whole “I managed to ship a whole video game” bit. The myth of solo game development is still alive and well, and I just want to take a second to acknowledge the amazing team who worked on the game. Elements of the game like the in-game art, voice acting, and sound/music were completely contingent on teamwork with my friends, and the game wouldn’t exist in the way it does without them even if I made like 99% of the game part. Sometimes it feels right to say “I made the game” in some contexts, but I just want to be clear that this wasn’t a solo project!
Endless thank yous to Phil Dragash for his close camaraderie, his art and his sound design skills. To Elspeth Eastman, for lending her voice to Snippy, LittleV Mills for his musical talent providing a real earworm of a main theme, Lee Mounsey-Smith for applying his excellent graphic design skills to both our final logo and the many excellent scrapped ideas, my friend Aaron for taking sound programming almost completely off of my plate (he made the systems that power the dynamic music speed), a separate friend who happens to share the name Aaron for some extra interface art (seen in the classic UI style), and my dear friend Fred Wood who provided endless love and support. And also access to a Nintendo Switch devkit. The love and support was good too, though. Lova ya, Fred.
Anyways, Game & Watch Gallery 2, right? This was the first time my mum had bought me a video game, and through my entire life I would continue to be mystified at her insane hit rate on buying me only absolute winners. Given it was the first one, I wonder if Game & Watch Gallery 2 was a fluke? She was always a good researcher, especially when it came to stuff related to her children’s interests, so I suspect some combination of that and a willingness to rely on the Nintendo brand was how that worked out. Whatever it was that happened, I doubt either of us expected it would have such a throughline to where I am now, all these years later. So thanks, mum (and indeed all of my four parents) for supporting me, my hobbies, and my interests through it all.
Game & Watch Gallery 2 is an interesting game to give to a kid as their only game to play. Fundamentally, it’s a collection of five remakes of classic Game & Watch LCD games with a few bells and whistles, but that’s the real meat of the package. If you’re not really into these sorts of games where chasing high scores is the only thing to do and there’s virtually zero in the way of progression, I think you’re liable to give each game a few tries before putting it down for something else. When I visited my dad every other weekend, I’d spend hours playing the Genesis he borrowed from a friend of his whose children had outgrown it, or I’d run next door to visit my cousins and play NES games with them. When I was at mum’s, it was Game & Watch Gallery 2 alone. I don’t think it took a terribly long time until I received another game, but when you’re a kid, every hour feels like an eternity. I remember just how much I played this game; the afternoons spent lying on the bed, the floor, the couch, then the bed again. The sun’s beams crawled their ways up, and back down the house as the AA’s slowly drained. I got very good at these kinds of games, and in retrospect I feel that if you want to raise a kid to develop an interest in the pure experience of playing a video game, I think there’s almost no better way to do it than to let them be alone with their special interest and an unforgiving score-chaser of a game like Game & Watch Gallery 2.
Fast Forward to March 2019. I was once again a student at Dawson College, a school that I had dropped out of nearly ten years prior. Or at least, I had thought I had. When I returned to the school, it quickly became clear that I had never finished the paperwork for dropping out, and I had instead been expelled. This caused a variety of little headaches when trying to return, but after some hard work and an earnestly handwritten letter to the school’s dean, I was able to attend their IVGD (Independent Video Game Design) program. This wasn’t a program that even existed when I first went to college, and it taught a variety of skills tailored to making your own games. I wasn’t clueless about this stuff going into the program, but it was definitely life changing for the better and I learned a lot from my teachers and classmates.
Anyways, come March 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, classes were shifted to be online-only via Zoom calls. My smartphone had been diligently working to destroy my attention span for years now, and this situation would test me harder than anything ever before. Thankfully, my grades ended up largely unaffected by my rampant mid-class internet browsing, but I knew it was taking my focus away. Seeking a better form of semi-distraction and being generationally removed from a genuine appreciation for Subway Surfer, I eventually grabbed my Game Boy Color from a drawer. It was atomic purple, though sadly not the original one I owned in my childhood, which had been a trade-in victim at my childhood Superclub Videotron to feed my lifelong addiction to buying games. I fished out my trusty copy of Game & Watch Gallery 2, which I had enough sentimental attachment to that I never ended up trading it in, and I got to work. Sure enough, I found that I was able to play it and focus on class pretty well, certainly better than when I was scrolling Twitter, so that’s what I did for the next two months or so. Please don’t tell my teachers.
Revisiting the game at this particular time in my life, I was struck by how impressive Game & Watch Gallery 2’s remakes actually were. The excellent Vermin remake in particular really stood out to me. Where the original featured enemies coming from one clear direction in a straight row, the remake featured Yoshi moving around a faux-circular space to slam enemies coming from all directions. The remake feels so much more lively and fun on the whole, with the original soul of Vermin burning brighter than ever in this new bloodthirsty Yoshi. Even though Vermin is my favourite Game & Watch game, the remake is so much more interesting that I seldom actually want to return to it.
After some more analysis of the various remakes in the package, plus a weeklong stint with Game & Watch Gallery 3, I was deeply committed to the question- what would Game & Watch Gallery 5 look like in the current era? There were a few things that seemed obvious to me like how Nintendo now tends to use 3D models for pretty much every game, so that’s pretty much a given. The more interesting thoughts came when I considered the structure surrounding an individual game.
In the Gallery games you pretty much had two difficulties per game and a pretty direct port of the original title with its two original difficulties. The main thing that was clear to me is that there are so many types of gamers for whom this is somewhat incompatible. People like to make progress in their games, whether it means working through a checklist or unlocking things. One needs only look at the extremely mixed reception to Mario Kart World’s sparse open world to see that a lot of people just don’t jive with play for the sake of play. Though it’s not exactly a revolutionary set of ideas, I was a bit surprised to realize that nobody had really taken Game & Watch-style game design down this route before. I felt that in a theoretical Gallery 5, each game would be given its own little set of menus with various objectives, play variants, and activities. Perhaps even a big ‘ol achievement grid a la Kirby Air Ride or Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Fans of the Gallery games would be satisfied with a solid baseline game already, so adding on an hour or two’s worth of gameplay challenges per game would really make for a robust package for others. And then I was like; “Well, why don’t I just make that?”
Bearing in mind I tend to have very little money to work with at any given time, my Game & Watch Gallery 5 would have to have some compromises- no 3D art was clear from the start, a very small quantity of music (we managed to make only one song work for the entire game, which I’m still impressed with), and biggest of all, only one game. This would become the eternal dilemma for the game that would become Garden Guardian- how do you sell a gussied up LCD game without the Mario brand by your side? That problem was the metaphorical can I’d kick down the road until it was time to launch, and one I don’t think I ever managed to solve.
Toys ‘R Us image borrowed from pori64’s Toys R Us NJ 1999 – 2000 Photo Album via Internet Archive.
Game & Watch Gallery 2 images borrowed from Super Mario Wiki uploaders.
This article is the first of a multi-part series on the development of Garden Guardian. Stay tuned for the next part!
For anyone interested, Garden Guardian is currently half price on PC and Switch for the week of its third anniversary! Check it out at https://linktr.ee/gardenguardian
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