Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would you describe it without using the usual genre labels?
Zenden is a game about obsessing over little details, and then stepping back to appreciate the big picture - and then zooming back in to fix one little thing: to get a perfect score and to make it look just right.
Maybe you like how a tree looks poking out from behind a temple. Can you preserve the harmony score of your garden by placing it there? Can you make the garden you want to see and complete the level?
Zenden is a game about finding balance. The game challenges you to not just make a trade-off between aesthetics and game mechanics, but to push both to their limit.
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
When I was traveling in Japan, I spent a day outside of the chaos of Tokyo in a traditional tea garden. This garden was about 400 years old, having been continuously curated for centuries. This place had been serving tea longer than my country had existed. More than just a relaxing experience in nature, this garden was a place to transcend time and feel your place in a part of a multi-century story. I wanted to distill this emotion, of the curation of a zen garden, of a story told and retold through the slow movement of rocks, plants, and paths through space and time, in a game.
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the same space?
The magic of Zenden is that it gives you a challenge without the usual mental strain of playing a puzzle game. Like a lot of cozy games, Zenden is first and foremost about chill vibes and relaxation. Staring at a sudoku puzzle isn’t very relaxing or aesthetically beautiful, but solving it is super rewarding. Zenden’s music and visual style relaxes the player while the puzzle mechanics actively challenge you. You get all the satisfaction of solving a puzzle without feeling the stress of taking an IQ test. Not a lot of cozy decoration games really challenge the player. Not a lot of puzzle games give you an experience of beauty. Zenden does both. When you’d normally be frustrated by getting stuck on a hard puzzle, Zenden invites you to watch the heron hiding in the reeds instead.
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish you could put back?
We had a UI element that let the player swap the contents of a palette scroll back and forth between garden items and terrain. A modified yin yang that animated when swapping the scroll’s contents, it showed the scroll’s current setting while also fitting the game’s theme. It was one of the first UI elements in the game that felt like a really unique component, and I loved how it looked. We wound up removing it after beta testing, because users wanted to see garden items and terrain at the same time, without having to swap between the two. It was definitely the right call from a user experience perspective, but I really miss how smooth it looked.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurd amount of work?
Zenden uses an isometric view, but allows the world to be rotated and viewed from multiple directions, with continuous rotation animation. Most isometric games don't do this - for good reason, I found out. The object layering system took ages to get right. It's really easy for long, tall, multi-tile objects to draw "partially out of order" in screen-space relative to each other: suddenly you have the top of a tree poking right through a tea house's roof, but only when viewed from the south-east. 3x1 items like the wisteria trellis were a real nightmare. Portions of one item needed to be drawn in front of, and other portions behind, other world objects. Our final solution is a system that splits each sprite into different-depth components on the fly, and orders the different segments based on the perceived world-depth relative to the camera. It's probably the technical aspect of the game I am most proud of.
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almost wanted to keep?
This goes back to the world-view rotation. Early in implementing that feature, instead of getting the “camera” to rotate around the world, I kept accidentally making the world flip upside-down instead. So instead of rotating your view to see behind a tall pagoda, you’d flip the ground up into the sky and all the trees would be growing down like roots instead. I still think it would be funny to put it back in as an easter egg somewhere, to let the player watch the chaos as gravity reverses and monks fall off the ceiling.
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?
Believe it or not: Zen.
Zen philosophy emphasizes direct experience and inner peace. The satisfaction of completing a garden combined with the relaxation of experiencing beauty allows players to really connect with the Zen inside us.
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
A bad job is better than no job. I had never taken on a serious pixel art project before Zenden - I’m a programmer by trade. A lot of the assets in Zenden are on their fourth or fifth iterations. Some of the best artwork in the game came out of assets that I was too scared to try, and did a bad job on when I forced myself to make them. By the third time I made the liondog statue, I was finally figuring out what it should look like. Now, it’s probably the best piece of art in the game. There was no path for me as an artist to do a good job, that didn’t involve doing a bad job first. We have 72 unique puzzles, and they have each gone through so much revision that only a handful resemble their initial versions in any way. Most of the first tries were pretty bad! Having a bad puzzle that you can tweak, resize, make a new item for, or even invent a new puzzle requirement for, is the first step in having a great puzzle.
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?
I hope people remember the satisfaction of building something beautiful that would not have existed if they hadn't played Zenden. Media is rarely an experience where the audience has the freedom to produce something new - but I think that's what makes video games special. You're not just looking at some pretty piece of pixel art, you're deciding the relationship between the elements of the garden. You're tweaking it until it looks right. Zenden isn't a game where the developers are the artists, and the players experience our art. Through the process of playing Zenden, the audience becomes the artist - we just put the tools in a convenient box for them.
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?
Because you deserve to feel good. Really! I think Zenden has something for everyone to feel good about. Solving a hard puzzle makes you feel good about yourself. Making an empty plot of land into a garden just makes you happy. Watching the steam rise off a teacup, or a bird landing on a tree branch, brings you a moment of peace. Noticing a spiderweb forming on the edge of a lantern post invites you to look again for beauty in the world around you. People feel good when they play Zenden, and you deserve to feel good. It’s really as simple as that.
Rose: Finally, the question we ask every developer: After everything you’ve told us, can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game? Why should we believe you?
The Student asked:
“What is a game? Is it clicking a cookie? Is it Blue vs Red? Is it stamping a passport, building a house, or digging a hole?”The Master replied:
“Zenden has a goal,
and things that stand in your way.
You’ll know if you try.”
We say: “It’s probably a game, or your money back!”