1.2025

Visit the main Jade Spring page!
 

Take some time to relax, potter, and decorate in Jade Spring, a small, independent Guild Wars 2 sandbox fan game. Tend your garden as a Xunlai jade bot, clearing weeds and pests, dispelling Dragonvoid blights, and furnishing your plot with architecture, flora, furniture, and ornaments from across Tyria!

  • Zen cleaning — engage in mini-games to spruce up your garden, clearing out bugs, invasive plants, trash, and leftover strands of Dragonvoid. Collect Karma from each task to spend on permanent improvements to your gardening and decorating abilities!
  • Granular decoration — personalise your garden using robust tools which let you easily move, rotate, scale, snap, and clear items. Acquire enough Karma to unlock the Decoration Manager, allowing you to clear items by type, change the time of day, and otherwise adjust the garden at a broad scale.
  • A Guild Wars 2 tribute — Jade Spring is an independent developer’s love letter to Cantha and to Guild Wars 2 in general, featuring hand-made art, models, animations, and music directly inspired by the worlds of Tyria.
Keep Up on Bluesky!

Development Notes #2

Jade Spring in-game image, showing a golden jade bot hovering next to various decorations (like a rustic arch and lantern) amongst sunflowers, foliage, and other greenery.

Hey everyone! It’s been just under two months since the first development log for Jade Spring was published (and just shy of three months since the repository was opened), so it’s about time for a second quick check-in! First of all, to anyone who’s been interested in and following Jade Spring, thank you so much. I am so happy to be able to share my random little project and interests; and the idea of you eventually being able to play the game for yourself both excites and terrifies me! I’m determined to make it as polished and enjoyable as I can, even with its small scope and my lack of experience.

Speaking of polish, Jade Spring has seen a lot of improvements since the last developer note. Thanks in large part to areyoshi’s diligent efforts play-testing an early build of the game, a couple dozen major additions and fixes were identified and worked on, such as better camera controls and behaviours, more fluid decoration adjustment tools, sprinting, first-person view, and lots and lots of fixes and polishing!

Jade Spring in-game image, showing a lantern decoration being dragged along a single axis, led by an arrow.

Controls are much more fluid now, for the most part. I’m still trying to chase down some weird edge cases where the decoration seems to simply ‘escape’ without warning or reason!

Jade Spring in-game image, showing a golden jade bot hovering next to a robot companion and a floating way-point.

Your garden steward and companion, golem Pulley-4! They will guide you through the beginning of your experience; and they’re carefully guarding a ‘safe point’ that you can always return to. Jade Spring imposes almost no restrictions on where and how you can place decorations, so you can always return to a protected area of land if you find yourself stuck.

Jade Spring stuff for 1.2a!! 🌿 Input mapping, sprinting, selection outlines, more tactile adjustments, per-decoration animations (like doors) and more #GuildWars2 #GameDev

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— Alec 🌸 (@slyllama.net) January 29, 2025 at 11:16 AM

Here are the next steps for Jade Spring:

  • Completion and testing of the current 1.1a build, focusing on clearing bugs (excuse the pun!) and polishing the game’s basic mechanics.
  • Next will be 1.2a, the last feature build. This will incorporate the Karma system, Decoration Manager, and Dispersion Flux-charging mini-game (looking forward to this one especially – it’s music-themed), and tie all those components together through the progressive story and objectives.
  • In the midst of all of this there are also a few more core decorations I wanna add, too; I also have some ideas for a couple more music tracks which would take their inspiration from End of Dragons places like Daigo Ward and Soojung Heights. Actually, interspersing struggle-bus programming with the concepting and 3D modeling jobs I really wanna be doing helps me maintain my pace and stamina.
  • I’ll tidy and streamline Jade Spring as best as I can (through the 1.2…a builds) before opening a more public test. There are some things surrounding the game I’m really looking forward to doing, like developing copy and art for the store page, and making a quirky little trailer that I have a fun idea for, hehe.
  • Once the game is ready I’ll be putting it out as a free fan game! After that I’ll continue to address the inevitable bugs that pop up, and if there’s a bit of interest, I love the idea of continuing to add more decorations like Mistlock, Elonian, and Astral Ward sets. For now though, I better focus on getting Jade Spring playable at all!
Jade Spring in-game image, showing the bug-clearing mini-game; a purple and metal mechanical device with a progress bar is featured as UI in the foreground.

Clearing out bugs using Asuran ‘Dispersion Golems’ – they disrupt air currents in order to keep pests away for a good while. Dragonvoid will follow the same clearing pattern, except that the Dispersion Flux will need to be charged through a fun music-based mini-game I’m just starting to work on now!

Jade Spring in-game image, showing the decoration pane, with a list of decorations on the left and a preview of an autumnal tree.

The decoration selection is expanding all time, but right now it’s still relatively limited. I will be adding some more garden basics, architectural pieces, and Canthan furniture in order to round off the initial release.

Thank you so much for reading this far, and again, for your interest in Jade Spring. I’ve had so much fun (and found so much meaning) making this tiny little game. /bloodstoneboogie all the way‼ (By the way, I post a lot about development and art on Bluesky, and I love chatting to people there, so do take a look if you’re interested.)

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