PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:

Hi everyone! I’m Alexandre (Yukim), a French developer. I finished my studies a year ago and decided to start a solo game development project: Garden Trills!

TELL US ABOUT GARDEN TRILLS.

Garden Trills is a cute adventure game where you play as a little sparrow and explore a variety of gardens where you can grow magical flowers to help you progress.

I really like cozy themes like nature and cute animals but I’m usually more drawn to action-adventure gameplay. That’s why I wanted to bring a little twist to the gardening game landscape by offering a more snappy and dynamic way to enjoy gardens.

HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

I love variety so the idea of doing everything (art, programming, music etc…) was very exciting. I started with the idea of playing a little sparrow exploring a garden, then the gardening mechanics came a bit later to flesh out the gameplay.

Overall, feedback came in clutch. Having friends try out the game regularly and the demo release really helped identify issues early on!

I can be a bit delulu when it comes to planning out the future, so I was initially aiming for a 6-month development. Now it’s looking like it will be a bit more than year total in the end.

WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?

As for the engine, I’m working with Unreal Engine. It’s a bit trickier than Unity for stylized rendering but it has a big library of tools that really speed up the development. Since I’m alone on this project, picking the productivity boost made the most sense.

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

The save system, by far! Saving NPC states and quest progression got me many headaches. I had to make sure the world is in a correct state whenever the player can save, or else players get soft locked in unnatural states. Nobody likes a corrupted save… And good luck finding these bugs!

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

This is going to sound very specific but hear me out: make tools (a lot)! Two reasons for that. The boring one: automating repetitive tasks will make you faster.

But my actual point is that it helps you “free” your creative mind. For example: if it takes time to manually align barrier segments to make a full one, once you’ve done it, you will be reluctant to change the shape, or make a new one, right?

In an ideal world, designing levels would be like playing a city-builder or Mario Maker: have all your focus on design and creation and iterating to make a great experience… I think it’s important not to let the technical work contaminate all your tasks and to make sure you sort out everything that make iterating a pain.

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

-Wishing everyone the best with your projects! Always inspired by people in this community, there’s tons of creativity and passion in there.

If you want to tag along my development, don’t hesitate to look up my twitter: https://twitter.com/gardentrills

-Alexandre

Garden Trills on Steam

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