Hi, everyone!
My name is Lorraine – I am a Game Designer for stillalive studios and was the Narrative Designer for Garden Life. Today I’m going to share with you a little bit about the inspiration for and development of the characters you can find in the game.
Robin
From the moment they were created, we knew we wanted Robin to be the most connected character to the garden. We also knew early in development that we wanted to create a sense of wonderous magic, a sense of exploration, optimism, and excitement.
Robin, being so connected to the garden and the world, had to feel those things as a way to invite the player to feel them too. Inspiration for such a character came from the positive aspects of characters in children’s adventure stories: Alice from Alice in Wonderland (which we were already very inspired by), Digory and Polly in The Magician’s Nephew, or Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Growing up reading these stories, these characters were not just adventurers but daydreamers and optimists who saw aspects of the world other people didn’t – something that really became a core part of Robin’s identity and their drive to make the garden a place their friends could lay down their burdens for a while.
Leslie
The inspiration for Leslie was incredibly easy. In 2020, I sadly lost my grandmother and hadn’t had the opportunity to honor her the way I wanted to, so when I joined the Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator team and learned there was to be an elderly female character of some kind,
I didn’t think twice about injecting my memory of her into the game. Leslie quickly became positive and encouraging, and hopefully makes the player feel as though she has their back no matter what. Her love of toads comes from my Granma too, whose house is still full of frog statues and pictures from all across the world.
Laurie
Laurie was a difficult character to write at times. We knew from the moment we created Robin that they were going to be a ghost, which of course meant they had passed away. I wanted the player to interact with Robin’s loved ones to highlight what Robin wanted the garden to be, so it only made sense to include a sibling among the cast. Even in the cozy and largely joyous experience that Garden Life is, it felt wrong not to honor the pain Laurie must have felt at Robin’s passing, and that sadness made her stand out among the cast as “the saddest”. To balance that a bit, she developed a stoicism that I think has become a uniquely British stereotype: Keep Calm and Carry On.
For Laurie though, this was drawn from the same place I draw from in times of trouble – not a need to be strong or tough, and definitely not just for other people’s benefit, but a wish to claim back some control against something that might otherwise spiral far more unhealthily.
Jasmine
Jasmine is my favourite Garden Life character. She is bold, strong-willed, wonderfully creative and deeply passionate; traits I admire and see in a lot of creative freelancers in the modern age. They are, effectively, where Jasmine’s origins began: someone who has to work far too hard just to get by, even if she recognises that as unreasonable, but is still willing to give everything she has to everything she does.
Perhaps it’s a bit of wishful thinking from me that she can do this without taking her foot off the accelerator pedal at any point, while also being a great friend to both Robin and Laurie. It should be noted too that her response to Robin’s passing is deliberately more proactive than Laurie’s, part acting as a tonal counterbalance and part validation that there are many ways to grieve.
Marcus
Marcus as a character didn’t have a direct inspiration. The foundation of his personality was built from a wish to give Jasmine a loving and fiercely dependable partner who was as driven and hard-working as she became over the course of her development. The icing on the cake of Marcus’s character was his love of magic, fantasy and the fantastical.
The story he tells when you complete the dragon Pavilion statue (Nightshade, who is awesome!) is – once again – inspired by my Granma, who alongside her frogs had many a fairy, toadstool, or dragon statue in her home when I was growing up, just like Marcus’s.
Frank
Frank began his existence as a less hands-on Gandalf. He is probably the character who went through the most iterations over the course of development. I think this is based in the fact that his was one of the last concept arts to be created, and until we saw him, it was harder to nail his exact personality down.
After that, he became an elderly uncle of sorts; always a solution to every problem, always an alternative way to look at a situation. We had long before established he would be very health-and-fitness focused and would run the local gym – when I saw his artwork for the first time, that almost became a playful subversion of audience expectations. Let’s be honest. He doesn’t look the part. And somehow that makes it all the more perfect.
Ema
We had long loved the idea that one of the characters you could meet in Garden Life would be responsible for making some of the decorations you could use in your garden, but it was a while before that character became Ema.
In a way, she is a narrative foil for Jasmine’s more chaotic youth, but she was originally more of a meta character than she developed into; the one character constantly questioning the slightly weird and fantastical elements you’ll find the longer you play the game. Tonally, that became less and less important as work went on, which left Ema a wonderfully simple character to write.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into the characters of Garden Life: A Cozy Simulator – they are a fun and quirky bunch who will long hold a special place in my heart. Of course, there is one more character in the game that I can’t and won’t take any responsibility for, and that’s you!
I hope you understand when I say that Robin, Leslie, Jasmine, Laurie, Marcus, Frank and Ema cannot wait to meet you and are very excited to see what you do with the community garden.
Much love, take care and – most importantly – have fun!
Lorraine and the whole team at stillalive studios 🌼
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