Chao Garden: Evolved 1.0.0

The first public build of Chao Garden: Evolved is up, for Windows and Android. It is the whole thing: the living garden, the eight modes, seasons, festivals, and chao that grow into the shape you raise them into.

What is in it

The garden is the centre. Chao walk it, swim the pond, climb the rockwork, fish, chase bugs and sleep where they fall. Seasons turn on a real-week wheel and the weather rolls through on its own. Every third evening the lanterns go up and one of nine festivals takes over the lawn.

Out from there: seven downhill Chao Board courses, fifteen Quest maps with a thirty-species bestiary, four Karate tiers, ten Race courses, fifteen Kindergarten classes, four Stadium cups, and Clash.

Notes from the last week of work

The light strings did not light. Lanterns hung on a cable had emissive materials and nothing else, and for fifteen of the nineteen hangable kinds the glowing part is sealed inside a shade, 2% of the silhouette on the Candle Lantern. The four that always looked right are the four whose whole body is one emissive material, which is why the bug read as mostly working for so long. Strings now carry a halo and, for the nearest two, a real light.

Chao changed colour a frame late in Karate. The model pack is painted at its base type colour and revealed nine lines later, and every spawn path only marked the look dirty, so the repaint landed after the reveal. It now repaints inside the load, ahead of the reveal, on all thirteen spawn sites.

Every chao’s mouth floated off its head. The exporter seats the mouth decal 0.04 off the skull where the eye sits at 0.013, measured at exactly that on all twenty-one packs. Invisible until Karate put the camera close.

Garden hints came back every sitting. The lifetime budget was only charged when a hint finished showing, so being interrupted or leaving the garden cost nothing. A budget charged on completion is not a budget.