Proto Garden will be releasing on December 11th! Here's some of the content you can expect:

• Over 150 techs to research on the research tree!
• More than 50 different plants, frogs, and fungi to place in your garden!
• Progression from a couple of flowers all the way to complete planetary regeneration!

Amphibians are arriving on the scene to assist your gardening! The main gimmick of Proto Garden's frogs and toads is that they provide moral support to adjacent buildings and boost them. Check out the Terra Toad, Butter Bullfrog, and Magical Mantella in this demo update!

The new trailer is way more representative of the current state of Proto Garden, since the old one was based on an early build.

Development has been chugging away these past few months, and with progress on the main game comes an overhaul to the demo! Just about every mechanic has been remade to be less laggy, I overhauled the entire UI, and blueprints have been added! In terms of full game stuff, there are 82 techs on the research tree now and I think the content is about half done so this has kind of exceeded my expectations considering that a few months ago I thought 70 techs was a bit of a stretch. Fun stuff!

The playtesting process is great, isn't it? Through iterating on the old demo, median playtime has gone from a tepid 6 minutes to a spicy 41 minutes. Wow! Proto Garden's old fundamental issues stemmed from one place: free exponential resource duplication. This feature warped the entire game into its own image, hamstringing every other mechanic and severely limiting the design space. While somewhat appropriate for the idle-esque inital prototype I made in March, it wound up overstaying its welcome. Core mechanic changes:

• You can no longer merge bees into swarms. They just go home instead now.
• Bees can hold a maximum of 16 items.
• Bees now drop 1 item when cloned.
• Buildings now cost the same no matter how many you have, rather than increasing in cost hyperexponentially. Freedom at last!

• The Space Hive now has a fancy new model I designed inspired by trying to cross a lunar lander with a beehive. I had a ton of fun making it, and I hope you like it.
• Crafting ambrosia now takes 1 pollen instead of 10,000 (what).
• 3 new crafting buildings. You can make wax and honeycomb now!
• 4 new utility buildings: Bouncy Buttercup, Stop Strawberry, Deposit Daffodil, Filter Flax.

• The new tutorial is lovely and smooth, compared to the prickly mess the old one was. It's less obtrusive than it was in the playtest, too. The simpler core mechanics made this possible.
• To be honest, I don't remember what the old demo was like any more. It's in the past now.

At long last, the beta is now live! Just about every aspect of the game has been overhauled, tweaked, and improved since the old demo. Feedback from this playtest will inform the new demo (coming soon).

Hey, busy bees! I've been working on new content and polish for the beta. Here's what you can expect to see:

• The number of techs has more than doubled
• Four new crafting machines and six new item types. You can actually make honey now!
• Complete overhaul to the core mechanics, removing the jank. Plant as many flowers as you want, the costs no longer go up the more you buy!
• Much simpler and nicer tutorial as a result of the new mechanics
• Complete overhaul of the UI
• Optimisation improvements