Moonlight In Garland News

[p]Hey neighbours! [/p][p]Hope you’re having a good week! Here in Garland we have some fun news: a tea shop is opening on the north side, just next to the Early Risers Bakery :D After day 11 in Spring, you’ll be able to take a tea brewing class with Cecile, purchase a kettle and brew tea at home using your foraged herbs with a fun little mini game. This update also gives functionality to the rock tumbler and adds a dehydrator that you will use to dry herbs for the tea.[/p][p][/p][p]Drinking tea gives you some fun buffs depending on the blend too. From standard stuff like boosts to total mental/physical energy to bigger things like regaining energy when in range of trees or in the rain or lighting up herbs at night so you can forage more easily, I've tried to make them fun![/p][p][/p][p]In other news, Moonlight in Garland has been nominated for an Australian Game Developer Awards for Excellence in Accessibility! The awards ceremony will be happening next week and you can stream it on the AGDAs Twitch channel if you want to watch. Make sure you check out the other games nominated too, they’re all amazing: https://agdas.com.au/2025-finalists/[/p][p]

I’ve also started streaming on Twitch again every Friday (Melbourne time) while I draw artwork for upcoming updates. So if you want to hang out and have a chill afternoon drop by! [dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]

Next update will be a big back end optimisation push as well as the cooking mini game but that needs a little more testing before I release it.

See you in Garland!

[p]Hey Neighbours! [/p][p][/p][p]Back to our regularly scheduled updates, though I'm a bit early this week! This update ticks off a lot of the left over furniture functionality from the roadmap as well as some accessibility features as well as community requests. Additionally there are some fixes for when multiple controllers are detected as well as windowed mode. If you're someone who plays across multiple devices (eg. swapping between steam deck and desktop) you may need to reset some settings but I'm working on making them more device specific.[/p][p][/p][p]Also: steal food from NPC fridges once you have access to their apartment :D[/p][p][/p][p]And of course lots of bug fixes, I always appreciate reading your reports so don't hesitate to send them![/p][p][/p][p] See you in Garland! [/p][p]

[p]Hey Neighbours! [/p][p][/p][p]Thanks so much everyone for making the release last week so fun and thank you to everyone who has submitted a bug report so far! I'm making my way through everything now and today's update will take care of the major reported ones. Next stop: getting more of the roadmap features out of the way![/p][p][/p][p]Just a note that I recommend playing at the default 60fps, and if you're using any of the settings in the Experimental area they might cause unexpected issues.[/p][p][/p][p] See you in Garland! [/p][p]

[p]Hey Neighbours!

Hope you’re having a great day! Release day omg wtf?

Garland is officially out of Early Access and there’s a 30% off launch discount for the first 2 weeks so go get it while it’s hot babyyyyy!

To be honest, I was never 100% sure I’d get this far so now we’re here I’m not sure what to say… being reflective usually makes me feel like throwing up, but when would be a better time than reaching a milestone like this?

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This is me sitting on the first map of Garland which I still have rolled up in a cupboard somewhere!

I started Garland in Jan 2020 and thought it would just be a silly little hobby. But I’ve never had much chill when setting appropriately sized goals so, like all of my silly little hobbies, things quickly spiralled into a life changing, all encompassing city.[/p][p][/p][p]

Every new dev bites off more than they can chew with their first project… but I guess I’m stubborn enough that I just kind of continued on regardless. [/p][p]

10 year old Violet her natural habitat: playing Donkey Kong on a train. The vibes have not changed tbh.

Did I scope creep myself into burn out? Yes. Did I make a lot of mistakes? Hell yes. Am I still learning and getting a little better every day? Fuck yeah I am.
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[/p][p]Above you can see me working where I did 90% of Garland: the couch. And my first play test, panel talk and live demo!

So 5.5 years in, what has Garland meant for me?

- A career and a huuuuge number of new skills?
- New lifelong friends and neighbours who I couldn’t have done this without?
- An unhealthy fear of opening my emails and new level of social anxiety?
- A million creative ways to dodge the question when friends and family give me and ask “So when do you think you’ll actually be done?”

Yes, but also the confidence that no matter what comes up in development (or life), I’ll be able to figure it out and keep going.



And yet, even with all that, somehow leaving Early Access still doesn’t feel very milestone-y? There’s still so much to do, so many features I’m planning to implement and my actual end goal: porting! It’s not… , so celebrating feels weird? And everyone has different expectations and I never want to over promise and under deliver.

So far every time I’ve hit a proper milestone with Garland, something has come up that makes it hard to celebrate. Game breaking bugs! Lockdown! Family deaths! Timezones and distance with friends! Burn out! Tech problems! Health problems! The all encompassing sinking feeling that yes I devoted a chunk of my life to this, but hard work doesn’t mean it’s actually a good game…



And if Tom Cardy has taught me anything, it’s that it’s that being in an endless loop with no pauses just ends with eating a lot of ham on stream so sometimes you need to celebrate that you cleared the damn level! (:medal: :earth_asia: :key: #inspirational)

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So after stream today I’m going to order some take away then go to sleep.

And tomorrow I’ll start again and we’ll see where this city takes us.

Continue?
>Yes
No



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[p]Hey Neighbours! [/p][p][/p][p]Just a little update today to do some housekeeping for release next week. This marks the official version change to 2.0.0A! It’s mostly polish and I’ve changed the EA gifts to register to your user id rather than be per save file so if you’re thinking of starting a new game at release feel free![/p][p][/p][p]And one last reminder that I’ll be streaming the release on Twitch and Youtube (@violetlebeaux) so some join me to celebrate the milestone![/p][p][/p][p]Stream time: 1:30pm Weds 27th Aug AEST (Tuesday night in the US)[/p][p][/p][p]Now back to working on the next update for me, hope you all have a great weekend![/p][p][/p][p] See you in Garland! [/p][p]