How Tranquil Garden's Been Doing + Future Plans

Hey Everyone,

It's been a couple of months since Tranquil Garden, our RPG about saving the world with your own personal playstyle and bonds to the characters, has released on Steam! We've had the pleasure of launching it and seen some wonderful successes, and we've learned a lot about working on games in general from this experience too.

Success is subjective and we're happy with these stats!

Tranquil Garden's development cycle was on-and-off for about 3 years, worked on consistently by 4 team members (with 1 of them managing most, if not all, of the game's programming/RPG Maker management and another 1 of them handling all of the mobile spinoff's programming). It was originally released to GameJolt and Itch.io in February 2020, and then to Steam this past September all for PCs (Windows).

The game used to look very different!

When we started developing this project, its temporary working title was "Project RPG Ex" with that last part standing for "Exercise" because this whole game was supposed to just be a test on how to produce an RPG experience. We started with composing a proposal document, presented the core gameplay and narrative ideas to the rest of the team, and we got to work with an older RPG Maker Game Engine (VX Ace).

We had a solid foundation, but there was room for polish.

We learned about file management and the importance of backing up game builds/assets the hard way twice as the project had to be scrapped then restarted from the ground-up twice. This overall development experience has drilled into our minds that we need to be mindful about testing, presenting, and archiving ongoing projects as well as their files... Thankfully, we stuck to our resolve and came out with an RPG experience that we're each very proud of playing as well as sharing with others.

There's our graphic designer's dog and... a mushroom-infected pupper too?

We're taking this game's release in stride and looking to bring Tranquil Garden into the light of what we initially wanted it to play and feel like too! There were gameplay mechanics, side-quests, and more that we wanted to implement but either couldn't figure out or just wouldn't have been able to balance in a timely fashion... SO that's why for the future, we're working on a more definitive version of Tranquil Garden alongside developing our Mobile Game puzzle project, Clear Circuits. Our team is honored and excited to be working with VoxPop Games on making this project greater, and we'll be working hard to share more consistent updates as we progress.

Well, that's all I've got for this Glass Robot Report! Thank you for having tuned in, and we'll see you around!

- Kairo the Glass Robot