Dream Garden

A small cooperative game for the Ventilastation talk at Overkill Festival 2026. The festival's Dream No Return theme inspired a garden whose players can choose a slower pace. This is an original sample game, not a festival commission or an official festival game.

Download the complete game. Use an up-to-date SDK main checkout. Extract the archive at its root to create games/demos/dream_garden/. The source, packed assets, audio and rebuilding recipes are included, along with tests/test_dream_garden.py.

Small first-game starter · Back to the slides

Play the finished game in the browser.

Playing on the desktop

From the SDK root, after following the desktop setup:

./vs-emu.sh --game demos.dream_garden

Windows uses vs-emu.bat --game demos.dream_garden.

The garden starts empty. Catch a golden seed to plant a flower at the catching player’s depth, displaced by 75% of the player’s width. While moving, catches plant in the current movement direction. After stopping, the first catch uses that direction, then later catches alternate sides until movement resumes. Each player has an independent sequence; opposite inputs count as stopping. Before the first movement, the first catch defaults to the left. Flowers drift inward at 8% of normal seed speed and disappear at the centre. Smaller, subdued golden seeds occasionally pulse with a randomly triggered glow. Missing a seed has no penalty. A second player joins by steering or pressing A, using an already reserved mint dreamer. Either player can slow the seeds. Clouds, planted flower drift and flower animation keep their normal pace. New spawn intervals also lengthen, after the pending seed deadline. Flowers gradually replace the oldest ones when the garden fills up.

There is no death, score, countdown or difficulty ramp. Watching is welcome. Music and bloom sounds start on. X toggles both, showing NOISY or QUIET for two seconds before the text slides outward past the rim over 450 ms. Another toggle resets the position and restarts the notice. B stops the music and keeps the current flowers in a still garden. A starts a new garden from the Rest scene.

How the example works

code/dream_garden.py contains the whole game. main() returns Title, which switches to Garden. Garden reserves its graph in build() and changes existing objects in update(). A collision grows a flower instead of ending a run. Pools cap seeds at 16 and flowers at 24, with explicit recycling for flowers. The second player costs one reserved sprite even before joining.

The Garden graph uses 42 sprites, 3 tilemaps, 3 layers and 5 image strips. The flower pool counts toward that cost even when its slots are hidden. The lower layer draws flowers first and players above them. The middle layer draws six subdued fluffy cloud shapes, followed by 9-pixel golden seeds. Clouds occupy 1 × 1, 2 × 1 or 3 × 2 tile cells, packed at 16 × 16, 32 × 16 and 48 × 32 pixels. Clouds keep scrolling at 0.45 depth units per tick. Seeds move 15% slower by default (0.3825), and slow to 0.102 while relaxing. Seeds always paint above clouds, including when their shapes overlap. The top HUD shows RELAX while A is held, then slides it out on release, plus temporary audio feedback. Both flips keep the top text upright.

The full CP437 font comes from the existing tutorial example. PNGs and YAML compile into a generated image ROM. MP3s stay on the emulator host or console base and never go into the rotor ROM. The sample follows the repository's GPLv3 license. Artwork sources and rebuilding record the new art and original sound synthesis. The general SDK tutorial remains a separate example.

Three parts for the short talk

The presentation launches three complete, cumulative versions. Their sources are inside the download at code/checkpoints/.

The final part matches code/dream_garden.py exactly. Additional fine-grained checkpoints remain available in the SDK for independent study. The short talk shows only these three launchable progressions.

A new garden starts without flowers. Planting follows movement, then alternates after stopping. All parts use the same packed artwork, with unused strips available for later features.

Checks

From the SDK root:

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -p test_dream_garden.py
mpy-cross games/demos/dream_garden/code/dream_garden.py -o /tmp/dream_garden.mpy

The tests exercise seam collisions, both controllers, shared slow time, safe pool exhaustion, long play, default-on audio and timed toggle feedback, voluntary rest and the exit path.