Garden of Being is not a game you finish. It is a place you return to.
A place is simply there. You visit when you want to. You leave when you leave. It does not grow resentful in your absence or demand anything on your return.
Beneath the surface, the game holds two things at once. The first is a garden you plant. The second is a quiet record of your visits, the flowers you chose, the times you came, and if you want, a line or two written beside each one. Nothing is analysed. Nothing is charted. The garden itself is the primary entry.
Oil Pastel Art
Every flower in Garden of Being was drawn by hand, in oil pastel. Not rendered, not generated, not traced from a photograph.
This is unusual for a game. Most games are built; this one is more like a painting that happens to be interactive. The slight unevenness of a petal, the way colour sits on colour the way it does in real pastel.
Sounds from Real Places
The sounds were recorded over many days, in many places. Processed simply with audacity(puns accidental), left mostly as found. Fair warning: the squirrels are loud and the crickets have opinions. Real places, real times, some bells. As natural as the game itself.
Handmade Dedication
Design a handmade garden, dedicate it to someone you love. Come back on their birthday. Start one for someone who is gone. Start one for your cat. Start one after a hard week because you needed somewhere to put it.
The gardens persist. Share a code and they can step inside the same quiet scene or a funky cricket madhouse, sit in it, leave their own flower beside yours. Or keep it entirely yours. A garden nobody else ever sees is just as real as one that is shared. Put you epsons, canons, letterheads, toners to work.
A Place To Gather Yourself
Most people are scattered. A garden is an old answer to this. You plant, you wait, whatever needed to settle settles. Garden of Being came out of an art practice in oil pastel, field recording, and code, made alone over two years with no studio and no fraternity. It is closer to a handmade object than a product. It is for people who are tired, people who miss a place, people who just like flowers.
inspired partly and wholly from the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother