Hello gardeners,
Can you sense the turn of the season approaching? We certainly can here in the UK as the frosts are starting to ease as work continues on The Garden Path. Its been an exciting month with work on multiplayer, localisation, and optimisation taking place. So, lets take a look shall we?
Game Updates
Development focus in February has been optimization, localization, and multiplayer.
You might remember last year the game had a big refactor to prepare its systems for eventual multiplayer. The good news is that the work is paying off!
While you may have seen in previous updates, we were able to have both characters on-screen, characters now have their own UI, inventory and equipment. It's now possible to run errands together, harvest the garden together, fish together, and more.

This is still only available in internal builds, but it shouldn't be long now before I can ship it out for testing.

Optimization work has been underway to prepare the game for Nintendo Switch and those on lower-end systems, but everyone should benefit from the game now being more light-weight.
Loading the game's world has been reworked, reducing loading into the garden from minutes down to seconds (on test systems!).
Lighting in the game has been reworked to be less system resource reliant. For those with older graphics cards, having multiple lights on screen, especially where they overlap, caused heavy loss in FPS. Most lights in the game have been replaced with much less heavy alternatives. It gives ambient lights, especially in the Garden's dark hours, a more fuzzy, filmic look. Looking forward to hearing any feedback.

Many of the game's textures have been reworked to load faster and use fewer resources, while (hopefully) still looking just as good. In some instances, the game now uses half as much VRAM as it did previously.
Most of my time this month has been spent preparing the game for localization so that the game can be enjoyed by players whose first language isn't English.
I've been on a big push to get all the game's text ready, and so while most of the work has been under the hood, testers will soon enjoy more item descriptions, dialogue, and errands to arrive in the build soon.
This also marks the start of moving on from the limited number of items included in the closed beta for testing, with the building blocks for the items that will be in the game's release now in place.
Your usual reminder!
And as always, here is your reminder that you can join our official Discord Community server, which you can join here. Here you can chat with the team, meet fellow backers, and help me shape The Garden Path. And of course, we encourage you to share your real-life gardening with your fellow gardening gamers.

Until next time
Louis, carrotcake
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1638500/The_Garden_Path/
[ 2023-02-27 14:26:12 CET ] [ Original post ]