[GARDEN GUARDIAN: Ready to mow?]
Garden Guardian was born from a fairly simple ambition: to create an Amstrad CPC game in the spirit of Skweek, featuring that fiendishly addictive little mechanic where simply walking over a surface transforms it. A basic, almost childish principle, but one that has that special something capable of making you lose all track of time. And occasionally, a few hours of sleep!
All that was left was to find a setting to host this concept. So I jumped into a little brainstorming session, imagining all sorts of situations where the player’s mere passage could change their surroundings.
What if you had to repaint a fence? Shave a face? Clean a tiled floor? Or maybe… mow a lawn?
Bingo! The lawnmower! Now there was an idea with plenty of horsepower under the hood!
The concept was set: armed with a trusty lawnmower, the player’s mission would be to conquer all the overgrown weeds in a garden within a set time limit. A sort of high-pressure gardening where the slightest blade of grass left behind could ruin your harvest… of points!
Before diving headfirst into the graphic design, I had the presence of mind to check if someone hadn’t already come up with the idea before me. A quick Internet search was definitely in order.
And then… disaster! A cold shower! I discovered that a Homebrew game on the NES, released in 2011, used this exact same concept. In other words, someone had already fired up the mower before me!
Never mind that! No way was I putting my gardening tools back in the shed. Even if the concept had already been explored, nothing was stopping me from offering a slightly more ambitious, personal take… both visually and in terms of gameplay mechanics.
And so, while keeping a close eye on that NES project, I set to work designing the visuals for Garden Guardian.
However, I was determined not to settle for a mere carbon copy of the original idea. With the NES game only featuring ten stages, I decided to give mine infinite replay value thanks to procedurally generated gardens. Enough to satisfy even the most die-hard gardeners, without ever running the risk of mowing the exact same lawn twice!
I also spruced things up with a few extra touches: frogs hopping in to stir up some action (and chaos) across the gardens, an animated menu, two screens explaining the game rules… In short, everything needed to bring this little green world to life.
Above all, I made a point of including a Bonus Stage, just to break up the monotony of the mowing sessions and offer a slightly different fun interlude.
This bonus section is actually inherited directly from another project I had imagined several years earlier: Roland Ahoy 2. In that game, you had to dig through rock in search of hidden treasure in an unknown location. It was a mechanic I wanted to dust off and give a second life to in Garden Guardian.
Ultimately, what started out as just a small game idea inspired by Skweek gradually evolved into Garden Guardian, and I invite you to give it a spin! 
GARDEN EN (2026).dsk (190,3 Ko)
Happy mowing! 
