“When we developed the game, the aim was to give players a very relaxing and peaceful experience.” This is probably not what you expect to hear from a game designer. But Sandra Honigman, game designer and game lead for Garden Tales: Match & Grow, had exactly that in mind when working on the new match-3 puzzle game.
In Garden Tales, the player is a gardener who helps restore an abandoned garden and the ultimate goal is to fill it with cute animals. As soon as you finish restoring a garden, you move on to the next level.
Garden Tales stays away from the school of thought that games have to be competitive in order to be interesting. Instead, it helps you escape from daily stress, which helps you relax and infuse some positivity.
“If you want to cool off after a stressful day with something simple and easy to consume, Garden Tales is for you,” explains Sandra indianexpress.com In a video interview. Sandra drew much inspiration from visiting gardens and parks in New York City with her team. Eventually, it helped shape the game and introduced the idea of peace and relaxation, which is inherent in gardens, especially in an urban environment.
Work on Garden Tales began in late 2018, well before Sandra came on board. Initially, a small team worked on the prototype and the game was in the development phase for a long time. “From the beginning of development, we realized that the game was all about relaxing and gardening. It changed a bit once we started adding animals and saw that creating those animal characters became the central focus,” Sandra said. “We went from something with a story around these animals to something that was storyless,” Sandra said.
ICYMI: Garden Tales: Match & Grow is now available!
Keep up your garden with cool match-3 puzzles and make friends with happy animals.
Grow: https://t.co/zMjFQbb37C pic.twitter.com/zmFwT6tG1v
— Apple Arcade (@AppleArcade) September 18, 2022
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Each garden in Garden Tales is unique and the animal characters change from one garden to another but there is a central character who always walks with you and keeps you in their own world. Once you upgrade the garden and complete matching puzzles, you earn seeds and in-game coins that you use to unlock the story.
“There’s no hard message, but it’s like a story of watching one’s struggle, and then overcoming that, with the garden as a central place of struggle,” she said.
Available exclusively on Apple’s arcade game subscription service, Garden Tales is a free game with no ads and no in-app purchases. Pay Apple a monthly fee and it promises access to a hundred titles that won’t be available on any other platform, plus cross-platform play lets you pick up and play games on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Garden Tales is a match-3 puzzle game aimed at casual gamers with friendly gameplay. Despite attracting millions of casual users, match-3 games don’t get as much attention as battle royale games like PUBG. “We think the market is, of course, huge because any type of player can always sit back and engage with the game that is within that casual puzzle space,” she said.
Playdots company photo (includes the team that worked on Garden Tales; Sandra is in the middle with blue hair). Image credit: Zynga)
It’s only been a week since Garden Tales made its debut on Apple Arcade, with the developer already planning to roll out a slew of updates over the coming months that include new gardens, new characters, new stories, new levels and a few new ones. Fun features included.
Garden Tales is developed by PlayDots, developer of the mobile games Dots, Two Dots and Dots & Co. In 2020, Take-Two – the gaming behemoth known for publishing major franchises such as BioShock, and through its Rockstar Games subsidiary, Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption bought mobile game developer Playdots. PayDots is now a part of the FarmVille mobile developer, following Zynga’s acquisition of Take-Two for $12.7 billion earlier this year.
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