Portugues
gaarden
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About the game
gaarden starts with almost nothing: a white page and one tiny cross. You click, and trees grow. Keep clicking and more things appear, and some of them start to move. The author describes it as half interaction and half observation, and the best way to see it is to take a break and play it slowly.
It was made for Ludum Dare 45, whose theme was "Start with nothing", and it takes the idea as the opposite of a strategy game. In a "4X" game you control an empire and conquer a map. Here you have no empire, there is no map to begin with, no win condition and no ending. The world is drawn in thin black lines on white, with a soft synthesised music.
The things to discover are an egg, a tree, a house, a mountain, a human, a baby human, an animal and a giant. Which one comes next depends on what you click.
Playing it here
The game needs only a mouse (or a finger), runs in the page and saves nothing: every visit starts with the empty page again. Sound starts after the first click. It is a small download, under 200 kB.
Click on the little cross in the middle of the screen, and keep clicking on whatever appears, near it. Things take a little time to grow, so if nothing happens for a few seconds, wait and look.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Mouse click or tap | interact with a thing: grow, hatch, build |
Tips
Be patient. The first minute is quiet on purpose. Click, then watch.
Click everything, more than once. Crosses, trees, eggs and people all react, and what a thing does can change after you have clicked it.
Let the world get big. Give the small things time: some of them do more when there are others around.
Credits and licence
gaarden was made by Jez Swanson (Jezzamonn) for Ludum Dare 45 and released under the MIT licence. The sound uses Tone.js (MIT) and the random numbers come from random-js (MIT). Their licences are in the text linked from this page. In this version the analytics code and the web page's social-media tags were removed from index.html; the game itself is not changed.
FAQ
Nothing happens when I click. Click directly on the small cross in the middle of the screen, or on whatever has appeared. Things take a few seconds to react.
Is there a goal? No. The author's idea is a blank canvas to explore.
Does it save? No, each visit starts from scratch.