{Alpha Demo} BGE project seeks volunteers

Aloha! I want to thank everyone who has supported this project over the last 2 years. With your help, we were able to release our alpha demo exactly 2 years from the opening of this project. There is so much more to do and I am looking forward to working with all of you. Onward to beta!

With the release of our alpha demo, we are looking for volunteers to help move us towards a beta demo. Testers, designers, and 2D/3D artists are most welcome. In fact, you are all welcome! Feel free to drop in and offer advice or ask questions.
I will answer any questions you may have about the development of this project, so please feel free to ask.

That being said, allow me to keep this really simple and present a brief game design outline:

The Garden alpha demo <— click here for access to the executables (178+ MB compressed)
The Garden development files
<— click here for access to the development files

The Garden is a simple point and click planet exploration game. You play as a lone “human” on the ocean planet Kai Nui. The object is for the player to travel the planet and discover everything for the first time to create the Encyclopedia’s of Elements, Flora, and Fauna. The main game play is a free roaming scavenger hunt to complete the encyclopedias, with travel abilities gained from element discoveries. There is no exp, combat, weapons, items, or quests.

Art Style
The Garden will follow a cel shaded, non photo realistic art style. A perfect example is the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai games.

i would like to work on this i have some art history pm me what u need to be done and a deadline and it will be done thanks

Thanks for your response, PM sent.

I have also update the initial terms to include basic copyright info. Further details will be provided for any willing artists.

I have been making steady progress with the games core mechanic and could really use a hand populating my world. Please have a look at the project page and let me know if you would like to help.

We are steadily moving forward and could use a hand with creating the concepts for the Encyclopedia of Flora. Please let me know if you would like to help.

This project is still active, please consider helping us out.

We are still looking for volunteers, please let me know if you can help.

I want to thank Lushmoss for providing these Fire and Earth Flora concepts, this is another milestone in this project and 1 more step toward completion. Thanks Lushmoss!

Fire Flora



from left to right; Burning Fern, Blazing Brier, Inferno Tree

Earth Flora


from left to right: Gold Shrub, Iron Tree

We still have a long way to go so please let me know if you can help. Thank you.

What a great style!

I love that tree. :eyebrowlift:

On behalf of Lushmoss and myself, thank you.

I have decided to call on any watchers who want to support this project, but don’t want to do any art or design related tasks. I need help with a huge list of simple and repetitive tasks. This project uses the trunk LOD, which is able to generate its own LOD from the original source. It is literally 2 clicks to do this, plus a minute or two to change some variables and move the generated meshes to a hidden level. The problem is that I have over 20,000 objects to apply this to for the current demo and over 200,000 overall for the entire project. You would get your name in the credits as a “Cadet”, which is all I can offer you. We will communicate via forum PM in a group conversation. I will start the group conversation on April 19th to hopefully give everyone a chance to consider helping. Please let me know if you can participate in this request.

CaptainAndrew, here’s that pencil drawing of the Floating Fern that I couldn’t seem to attach in the PM. Sorry again I missed the part about checking with you before I started, but it’s just the pencils.


Wow, sorry the image is so large. I can’t seem to edit it to make it smaller.

Thank you for the support, this looks great! I will publish this to the project as the initial concept for the Floating Fern. Let me know what your next step is or which concept you want to do next.

I’m glad you like it, I started coloring it but it’s taking longer than I thought since I have to use a mouse. I’ll post a sample. I was thinking of making the ‘leaves’ multi-colored like absorbing rainbow abilities.

I like the rainbow effect idea, however it needs to stay within its color palette. Sky Mana would be in the Blue/Indigo color range, so you could have a bit of variation in that spectrum. Transparency is also your friend when designing Sky Mana concepts.

I like those ideas better, I’ll definitely do something with the transparency thing too. Does the Floating Fern produce Sky Mana?

How about this version? Do you like them coming out of the clouds? I haven’t finished all of the leaves yet so I thought you should see it before I went any further. I do like the transparent look better, hope you can tell. (My Wacom is working now)

That looks perfect, the transparency and color give it a real magical look. The elemental flora produce Mana in various forms, some produce raw Mana, others produce leaves, flowers, and fruit that are made of Mana. The Floating Fern is made of Sky Mana, but doesn’t produce raw Mana. They grow directly from clouds in the mid to upper atmosphere, so that looks great as well. They don’t need a visible root structure either, just FYI. I would be happy with this concept as is, but let me know if you have some more tweaking you want to do. I will publish this with the next update and try to get one of our modeling supporters to make a mesh, unless you were planning to that.

If there is no rush I was going to do the mesh too, although I’m not sure about how to do a 3D cloud. But if you have a schedule to keep then go ahead and use someone else. I still have to do one more big leaf and I was going to try and put some darker blue/indigo fades into it.