Development Blog

The last two weeks have been doing the final touches on the cage section of the tutorial. Now it's fully complete, and I've finished the layout and functionality of the grocery store, Planthony's!

Within those 6 units, 1 must be a leafy green, 2 must be vegetables, and no more than 1 may be a fruit. If that all sounds complicated, yes, maybe it is; but I'll try to decomplicate it within the tutorial, and I feel it's a system that's more or less accurate to what a healthy diet looks like for a guinea pig (not too much sugar, lots of nutrients).

Thank you for reading! ♥

The cage part of the tutorial is finally done! This means the player can now buy items and customize adopted guinea pigs in the first part of the tutorial, and place items, fill certain items with pellets, water, and hay, and this week was spent adding the final step to this second part of the tutorial - actually putting the guinea pigs in the cage.

The next step will be starting the third and final part of the tutorial, which will guide the player how to buy food, how the in-game logic of food storage and servings work, and how to feed the guinea pigs.

I also made some practical fixes, like making it so that only one panel can be open at a time (so the Pigs and Storage panel can't be open at the same time, and clicking on one automatically closes the other).

There is now also a working inventory system, whereas before the items were really just buttons that let me place items into the cage, including multiple of the same item even though you only buy one of each in the tutorial. Now each item is properly stored and states the number of how many you have.

As you can tell in the video, the piggies are now running instead of walking. This is the beginning of implementing actual guinea pig behavior, and I've made it so it will be easier to add things similar to hiding behaviors such as popcorning and pooping.

I've never made a game at this scale before, and I'm starting to realize the bigger it gets, the more difficult it gets to program it and add even more features, especially those that add onto or overlap with already existing ones. Even though the game is technically far from finished, I don't think the things that will be added (like happiness meters, health upkeep, day cycles) will take much more time than everything else.

I may have mentioned it before, but I am still considering releasing a demo of just the customizer and a simplified cage setup to watch them walk around. I thought I may have released it by now, as I'm able to do that, but I think I'd rather do it when more of the game is done in order to see just how much bigger the game is than just the customizer. I'd like to think quite a lot, but I don't want to 'spoil it', as it were. If / When the customizer demo is released, I'll start posting to social media more, while still keeping focus on the game.

Thank you for reading ♥

This week was spent chipping away at tutorial progression and finishing pattern animation sheets and masking sheets for the walking animations.

There's three or four sections of the tutorial, and as I complete it, the more of the game gets finished. The first part of the tutorial, which I've been calling the "Lia" part of the tutorial (the name of the shopkeeper), has been finished for a while now - the second part ("post-Lia") is now finished, which shows how to place and interact with items in the cage. The last addition in order to finish this section of the tutorial was to make it possible to fill, clean, and stow away water bottles, hay racks, and food bowls.

Thank you for reading ♥

The past week, there's been many improvements and work done adding animations and more customization to Guinea Garden.

Added RGB masks so that each current pattern has variants, and allowed player to choose multiple patterns at a time, allowing for tri-colored guinea pigs. This means you can now have over 288,000 combinations of guinea pig breeds/patterns/colours.

Thank you for reading <3

I've started to post clips of Guinea Garden on social media, but these videos don't really give a clear picture of the actual, current progress of the game. First, let me paint a clearer picture of what the game is about: Guinea Garden is very much in line with Tamagotchi-type games and the Petz/Nintendogs franchise. You adopt guinea pigs, feed them, brush them, pet them, and love them. I think a big difference between Guinea Garden and these other games is the game loop; Nintendogs and its similar titles get boring quickly because there's only so much walking, brushing, and petting you can do until the novelty wears off. When you have a real dog, even if it's old and lazy, they always keep you entertained and you never stop loving them. They give you side eye when you do something odd, they run around in circles for no good reason, they enjoy rubbing their butt on your brand new rug. The same applies to guinea pigs. They're vocal, have their own personalities, with their own likes and dislikes. Conceptually, I hope Guinea Garden will feel more personable, with guinea pigs having their own preferences, unique reactions to items, and unique behaviors specific to their breed and gender.

Most importantly, there is an emphasis on education about pet care. I thought of making Guinea Garden in the first place because so many people get a guinea pig without really knowing what goes into it (myself included - I bought a solo guinea pig at PetCo when I was 16, and then only realized later that they absolutely require a companion. My first pig also had a lot of health problems when I first got him, owing to the fact that guinea pigs bred to be sold at major stores are not treated properly.) I know a large part of the player base will be people who already own guinea pigs, but I hope the game also reaches people who want a guinea pig and don't have one yet. Taking care of pigs isn't hard; I just think it's important you know what you're getting into before you get them on an impulse (like I did).

The way the educational aspect behaves in-game is with little (i) buttons next to absolutely everything: information about toys, materials, piggy behaviors, and so on. You earn coins for learning new information, as well as taking care of your pets properly. Items are priced according to real-life prices (more or less). You'll be able to save coins and unlock/buy items as the game goes on, with big milestones including being able to buy bigger cages and therefore able to adopt more guinea pigs.

To give you an idea of where the game currently is in development, here's what is currently possible step-by-step:

• A start screen with a "start", "info", and "settings" button.
• Pressing start brings you to Lia's shop screen, where you fill in a form with your name, an option to skip the tutorial, and your favorite color (affects the background color of the main game/cage screen, which can be changed later).
• A tutorial where Lia, the pet shop worker, talks you through all the items you need to buy for the piggies, including hay/pellets, houses, toys, various supplies, and a suitable cage.
• Pressing (i) for information on each item gives you coins which allows you to purchase the items.
• Lia then 'shows' you the available guinea pigs, taking you to the customizer screen to create 2 guinea pigs.
• The tutorial then guides you through how to add items to the cage (this part of the tutorial is unfinished).
• It is possible to click and drag piggies made in the customizer into the cage and watch them walk around (currently working on animations for every breed & pattern - currently the American breed, with or without the Dutch pattern can walk around animated).

And that's about it for now. Rather than tell you all the things I'm yet to add, I'll just broadly say that the real work for me starts now - the actual systems that effect guinea pig happiness, how happiness affects behavior, interactive play like brushing, etc, etc - will be implemented in the upcoming weeks.

All in all, this game is not very complicated. Most of the time spent will be making loads of sprites. I'm estimating that the game will be finished in winter this year, and the specific goal I've made for myself is December 2025. Without getting too much into my personal life, I'm currently able to work on this game any time I want as long as I want, but that could change. But the game will be finished, one way or another. I'll be posting updates to this blog weekly, and you can subscribe to the newsletter to stay updated if you'd like (you'll only ever get updates - no spam or promotional material.

By the way, this will be completely free to play on desktop on guineagarden.com (not up yet). I'm not sure how mobile play will work; Google Play has a one-time developer fee to upload apps, but Apple Store fees are $99 recurring yearly. So either the game will be playable on mobile web (unlikely, as touch controls for web games are janky), the app will only be available on Google Play, or you'll have to pay (something like $2 to download or include adds) to play on iPhone. Regardless, you can support me on Ko-Fi. Guinea Garden will always be free (or cheap on Apple), but I'd be grateful for donations to cover software/business/developer fees ☺

Thank you so much for reading ♡