Garden: Urada Chapter is a retro sci-fi RPG for Gameboy made with GB Studio featuring a party of three characters assisting a colony on a recently colonized planet.
Key features
Story
Character progressions (levels, equipment)
Turn based combat scenes.
Game world with enemies, treasure and puzzles.
Challenging boss battles.
Project status: Released
Download available at
Development Blog
A take from Table of contents.
Dialogue from the first scene.
27.10.2021
In the previous post, I covered the spreadsheet containing game information and mechanics data. This post introduces the document containing the dialogue script and story-related information of the characters.
The table of contents shows the structure of the script. Under the main header "Scene script" is the header for a story arc that contains all the scenes, as subheaders, with new dialogue relevant to the arc. Some scenes have an alternative version. The optional story arcs, such as side-quests, are presented after the main story.
The script does not describe the scene other than the dialogue, though some cases are mentioned, for example, when a character moves in from outside of the screen. If someone other than the writer is building the scenes then a more detailed description of the scene is needed.
In addition, the script shows the value of the variable the game uses to keep track of the story's progress, so the developer does not have to search the value from the game's code.
One of the player characters in the Character stat calculator sheet.
Part of the enemy sheet showing the info on the games first boss enemy.
12.10.2021
There are two main documents I use while developing Garden. First is a spreadsheet that contains a large portion of game information and mechanics. The second is a text document containing all story-related materials. In this post, I will briefly introduce the spreadsheet.
The first sheet of the file is reserved for some general information like a rough development schedule, estimated player progress during the story, and general notes. Next is a changelog sheet containing changes from previous versions. It is followed by an exp table for player progress and map layout sheets.
The next two sheets are probably the most important ones to me while developing. They are the player character stat calculator sheet and the enemy sheet. The character stat calculator uses the same values that are used in-game to quickly display various stats based on level and equipment. It also shows how those stats affect the characters' skills. The enemy sheets show all the technical information of different enemies. Both sheets are used to create the key encounters in the game, mostly boss encounters, that require careful tuning to reach desired experience for the player.
The rest of the sheets are mostly lists of data: enemy skills, items, NPC vendors, and a game mechanic guide sheet intended to be included in-game.
Last, but not least is a notes sheet used to keep track of some variables, math calculations, and misc info.
The boss' overdrive is full.
Trigger, at certain HP the boss gains increased defense.
One of the party members has inflicted blind status to the boss, causing its overdrive attack to miss.
18.3.2021
Boss fights have a few mechanics to spice up the battle.
Most noticeable is the boss overdrive which is indicated by two circles on the left side of the screen. The circles fill up as the battle progresses and once they're full, the boss unleashes a special attack. The overdrive attack can have a devastating effect on the party for what the player should be prepared to deal with. The party is equipped with various ways to deal with different kinds of overdrive attacks.
The second unique mechanic to boss fights are triggers that happen when certain conditions are met, for example when the boss has lost a certain amount of health. The trigger effects are various, including power-ups, special attacks, modifying existing mechanics... The triggers take priority over the boss' all other actions.
Chain actions give some predictability to the boss' actions outside of overdrive and triggers. In a brief example, Action A is always followed by Action B which is followed by Action C. Action B can occur independently from Action A, but Action C only happens after Action B.
The bosses gain more mechanics as the player progresses through the game, ultimately leading to some optional bosses with several mechanics that the player has to develop strategies for in order the beat them.
Game version 0.7.0
Menu prior version 0.7
Version 0.7 menu
18.2.2021
As the resources for displaying actors and number of text characters in menus are limited in the current version of GB Studio, I edited the ASCII file where the game gets all of its text based data. I replaces some unused characters with symbols and combination of smaller letters and used those in the menu as seen on the right image.
Game version 0.7.0
27.1.2021
The games third progression tool is a Drone that can move over water and use Gravity Lifter tool to move rocks. It is also ignored by most monsters.
Previous tools include the Gravity Lifter for moving rocks and Climbing Gear to scale rock walls.
Game version 0.7.0
20.1.2021
Demonstration of picking a modification for a character's weapon. Lower part features list of available mods and upper part shows the character's stats with the chosen mod which is indicated by a dot in front of the mods name.
Game version 0.7.0
20.1.2021
Another step away from dialogue based combat information.
Game version 0.4.x
