Concept art depicts 3 characters in a sort of standoff in front of two mossy-roofed buildings made of wood and stone. Two characters have weapons at the ready (a bow, two blades) and the third is holding a cooking pot.

2025 Year in Review

Hello and happy 2026! We have a new website! Many thanks to FullyIllustrated, CodeThirtyTwo and our backend engineer Lena Guerrero for making it happen.

With this website overhaul comes a press kit where you can download concept art from Project Gardens (working title) and find general studio info. The new site has also granted us the ability to publish blogs — a grave responsibility and a power we promise to use only for good.

2025 was big for Gardens Interactive, and while we’re still keeping our debut game a secret for now, we want to share a glimpse of what we’ve been up to and what’s ahead of us as we delve into a new year, torches and cooking pots in hand.

Concept art depicts 3 characters in a sort of standoff in front of two mossy-roofed buildings made of wood and stone. Two characters have weapons at the ready (a bow, two blades) and the third is holding a cooking pot.

Gathering of the Gardeners

Folks, working from home rules. Speaking for myself — hello I’m Molly, the community director here and I’m making this my soapbox — there’s nothing you could say to me to get me to work under an HVAC in an open plan office with fluorescent lighting again.

That said, one of the tradeoffs is that it’s much harder to build the kind of team rapport and creative chemistry over Slack and Google Meets that can make or break a project.

Sometimes, to make a video game, you need to follow your coworkers into the woods.

A photo taken in the woods in Santa Cruz, CA. Our art director is making a face from among the trees. _{Can you spot the Art Director carefully hidden in this photo?}

This is why our brilliant ops team makes sure we get together in the same place for a few days twice a year, where instead of working through Jira tickets, we take big walks in the woods, eat ice cream, observe whales, learn about the local ghosts, solve mysteries at Meow Wolf and lose our voices at karaoke — as much from singing as from cheering on the local couple who go to that karaoke bar every week and sing My Humps.

A group of Gardeners tries to solve various puzzles and mysteries at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM This year we went to Santa Fe, NM and Santa Cruz, CA. I didn’t ask, but I’m assuming we’re trying to work our way through all of the Santas. If you have any Santas you’d like to recommend for our next trip, please email us at community@gardens.dev.

Further Adventures

While the rest of the team’s been heads down working on the game, we’ve spent much of 2025 on a quest to find the right partners to help us ship the game we want to ship — that means investment, but also publishing support, and even vendors and software partners for things like localization, running playtests, or moderating an online game!

In June, we showcased Project Gardens to a wider audience of publishers, investors and game developers at a secret teahouse party during Summer Game Fest. We had over 100 people show up, even though we asked them to come to a teahouse across town, take off their shoes, sit on the floor, and drink tea with us during one of the busiest weekends in games.

That event kicked off a lot of conversations that had us traveling all over the world this year. Traveling to where and talking to who? We’ll tell you later! In the meantime, here’s a breadcrumb trail of out of context photos we took during our travels.

A nice robot and his robot dog. _{We met a nice robot and his dog in [REDACTED]}

A bottle of water, a pack of marinated boiled eggs, a giant cream bun and a box of banana milk on a hotel bed. _{We ate a lot of delicious food in [REDACTED] with [REDACTED] but I only took a photo of this perfect jetlag meal — long live banana milk}

A racecar bed with a giant photo of a racecar behind it. _{We had to book an extremely last-minute flight to [REDACTED] and our only hotel option was this place with racecar beds}

A big digital sign that reads _{We went to [REDACTED] where a clock counting down to your next meeting has the same energy as the moon in Majora’s Mask}

Join the Project Gardens Secret Playtest Club*

_{*also a working title}

We’re building an online multiplayer world that leans heavily into the ways players interact with each other so it’s been essential for us to start running regular playtests with players outside the company, even during pre-production.

Running playtests and discussing the feedback that follows alerts us to blind spots we might’ve missed without getting real players into the game and seeing what they make of it all, and helps us validate our design hypotheses, like:

True: “If we make this cooking pot big enough, players will try to sit in the soup like Bugs Bunny"
True: “If we tell players to look out for a big boar wearing a too-small hat, they will let us know they think the boar’s hat fits him just fine and in hindsight, they will be right”
False: “The world is flat” (incorrect — it’s a bowl)

Various Discord screenshots that read: At this stage of development, we’re especially looking for playtesters who play games with comparable mechanics or social dynamics — games like Sea of Thieves, Arc Raiders, Legend of Zelda, GTA Online and Final Fantasy XIV — and who interact with those games in different ways (PvP- vs PvE- vs non-combat-focused players, for example). We’re making a game that does a lot of familiar things in novel ways, so it’s really important to have players get in there and tell us what’s working and not working for them.

Our friends at DAQA help us immensely with this process by inviting in players from our target audience, designing surveys, and providing raw data and summary reports. We also directly reach out and invite players into our community to play and provide feedback — this is restricted mostly to friends & family referrals at this stage, but that will change later this year as we enter production and begin to grow our community in earnest.

A Discord screencap that reads _{Our playtesters are so dedicated that they even love filling out our sinisterly worded post-playtest surveys. #blessed}

And that about wraps up 2025! Thanks for following along for the journey so far. There’s more to come this year so if you’re interested in being one of the first people to play Project Gardens, keep an eye or two open for updates from us!

— Gardens Interactive Team