Devlog: New Sprites & Pause Menu in Idle Garden 🌱

10 Aug 2024

Hey everyone! I’m excited to share that version 0.14 of Idle Garden is now live. Here’s what’s new in this significant update:

New Plant Sprites

When I first started developing Idle Garden, I used AI-generated art for the sake of expediency. However, it’s always been my goal to move away from that. Today marks the beginning of that transition with the introduction of custom pixel art plant sprites. I’m much happier with these new sprites, and I think you will be too. The switch to a spritesheet format has also allowed for much better animations compared to the previous individual images. In the long term, I plan to transition all the game’s art to this new pixel art style. In the meantime, you might notice some conflicting styles, but this is only temporary. A big thanks to my husband Henry for stepping in to create this fantastic art!

Pause Menu

In the levels release, I added a save icon in the upper corner of the sidebar, with plans to eventually replace it with a pause button. Today, that plan comes to fruition. Clicking the new pause button brings up a menu where you can save, mute/unmute the music track, and quit the game.

Dev Mode

I’ve also implemented a dev mode option. In past updates, I’ve accidentally released versions with testing values still active, which required a point release to fix. With dev mode, I can now test the game more thoroughly without worrying about messing up a future release. For those who want to skip ahead to an easy mode, you can access dev mode by holding down the ‘d’ & ‘e’ keys and tapping ‘v’. This will give you 1000 cash, 500 seeds, and 400 score—just be careful, as this is irreversible.

That’s all for this update! Stay tuned for more updates.

Happy gardening! 🌼