Hey neighbours!
We made it to the last update of the year, thank god because my brain is soup!
This update has some fun things I hope you'll love including:
Custom flooring
A special winter hat
A holiday bonus as a thank you for being a great neighbours this year
Schedule updates so you can now have roommates!
Quality of life upgrades to some apps
Accessibility updates.
As we close out the year here I want to take a minute to say thank you. I'm just one person but making a game like this takes a whole city of people supporting me.
Thank you to my husband James, bffs Celina and Tobias and all of my friends and family who have allowed me to pour my focus into this.
Thank you to Garland's amazing support team Pritika, Meredith, Tash and Kayla and to our tireless Building Managers Mandee and Bailey.
And the biggest thank you to you, the Garland community! I'm so grateful for everyone who takes the time to send a bug report, test a beta version or leave a review. So much of Garland comes from us just listening to each other and having fun together so I'm really proud of the community we've built.
Little kindnesses we give to each other never seem like a big deal at the time but from little seeds big forests can grow.
Personally and professionally it's been a pretty difficult year for me so I'm going to be taking a break over the next month or so to regroup. That means the next update to Garland will probably be late Jan/early Feb but I promise it will be worth the wait.
I hope you all have a really relaxing break and I'm looking forward to hanging out more next year!
<3 Violet
_______________________________________________________________________
2.0.0H - Patch (PC and Mac) (Full and Demo) - 15/12/25
_______________________________________________________________________
Current song: buy me presents - Sabrina Carpenter
Special:
- Added a special winter hat.
- Added a $10k thank you bonus for the holidays <3
- Noticeboard - There’s now a cash bonus if you complete all 3 tasks in a day.
General:
- Second change romance - No longer removes the flower from inventory if it’s too soon.
- Updated tracking of player bed positioning and added to save file.
- Adjusted collisions in: post office, music shop, all Cedar Court apartments.
- Credits - Adjusted fade out
- Credits - Added prompt text for hold left to speed up credits.
- Sfx - added sound to collecting a sketch and learning a recipe.
- Time - adjusted time to run slightly slower and time accessibility options are better balanced now
- Icons - Fixed one frame flash of incorrect sprite.
- Initiatives - Fixed fish tallies not increasing when fishing mini game is turned off.
- Initiatives - Fixed new spaces tallies not triggering when complete.
- Hairdresser - Fixed hairstyle not showing right away.
- Cooking - Fixed reward item when mini game turned off.
- Tea - Fixed reward item when mini game turned off.
- Pet shop - Fixed crash on incorrect notification during buy all > cat food.
- Farm - Removed legacy pop ups.
- Rocks - Added rocks to nightly garbage collection.
- Sophie’s cats - Adjusted height placement.
- NPCs - Fixed apartment access not loading in correctly in some situations.
- Movement -Adjusted some movement mechanics during cutscene to avoid stuck situations.
- Mirror - Added remove clothes buttons.
- Collisions - Fixed slipping into various buildings.
- Fixed various typos.
Menus:
- Added hover selection in menus rather than click selection when using keyboard/controller in residents, help, news, notes, photos, buildings, weddings, pets.
- Residents - Added icons for if you’ve given a gift or talked to a resident that day.
- Banking - Changed “loans” to “bills”.
- Banking - Revamp transactions page to include sorting by type etc.
- Calendar - Fixed player birthday not updating when loading in
- Pet shop - added auto select on pet click.
- Fixed some issues with saving buttons in scrolls when forcing selections manually.
- Settings > Help - Removed help tab on title screen.
- Settings > Help - added a bunch of new reset help options.
- Settings > Audio - Added a reset all audio option.
- Settings > Audio - Changed Master > Main
- Settings > Accessibility - Added timer options for Private Detective and FoP fishing mini games.
- Settings > Accessibility - Added Pixel Interpolation toggle option (sorry, it’s just Gamemaker’s basic version for now).
- Save - Removed ability to overwrite other saves, must save to an empty slot.
- Save - Added highlight to currently loaded slot.
- Removed outdated Early Access references in menus.
Inventory/Items:
- Added take/store/buy/sell 5 items to submenu.
- Hammer - Can now use hammer to remove plants BUT you will lose the seedling
- Stacking - You can now stack consumable items eg. Cat food. Note - You can’t stack important tool items eg. Cleaning Cloths.
- Watering Cans - Fixed Efficient and Magic watering cans not working on pet food or other situations
- Cleaning Cloths - Fixed Absorbent and Super cloths not working in some situations.
- Cameras - Fixed Efficient and Digital cameras not working in various situations.
- Plain black pot - fixed typo
- Added correct sprites to cooking items.
Furniture:
- Flooring - After 29 Spring, Surface Studios now stocks flooring.
- Flooring - Added floor covering to all apartments.
- Flooring - Added 8 styles of flooring in various colours (total 39 options).
- Wallpaper - Fixed top pixel of custom wallpaper showing at top of some rooms.
- Wallpaper - Converted existing wallpaper to nineslice sprites and optimised code in anticipation of adding new wallpaper soon.
Roommates:
- You can now invite NPCs to move in with you when you marry them or by using a key if you are good enough friends.
- If you are already married, just get a key from the Wedding Boutique and ask your spouse to move in.
- If you break up or divorce, NPCs will move out. There currently isn’t a way to evict a platonic roommate but that’s coming soon.
- You can have multiple roommates.
- Roommates will pay $500 rent weekly.
- Added key item to wedding boutique shop to invite NPCs to move in with you.
Schedules/Paths:
- Full rewrite of NPC schedules (update to wiki coming soon) to accomodate for reactive schedules when things change eg. marriage, festivals etc.
- Full rewrite of NPC spawn logic.
- Fixed NPCs stuttering on each other
- NPCs now remember where they were in the room when on wandering actions
- Updated transition nodes.
- Adjusted random spawn logic.
- Spawn locations - adjust various placements eg. justice centre doors.
- Added auto exit to pathfinding if not path found.
Weddings:
- Added 4 new colours per outfit (22 total now). If you have an event already booked, you’ll need to cancel and rebook to get the right clothes.
- Fixed clothes not changing during the wedding sometimes.
- Fixed wedding not triggering easily if you’ve previously cancelled an event.
- Fixed final line of celebrant dialogue not firing sometimes.
- Adjusted marking wedding active until the second part so it’s easier to retrigger if you have to exit in the room.
- Added NPC move in option to planning stage.
- Fixed Spouse not spawning into apartment after event in some situations.
Events:
- MP BE 1 - Adjusted bag guy path.
- MP BE 4 - Adjusted path and added time out to mini game in case the bad guy gets stuck.
- CC BE 2 - Fixed crash from typo.
- Changed nightly Petal Event check to not run at midnight unless you’re in your apartment to prevent jump in events.
- Ryan PE 1 - removed Ryan’s shirt.
- Max PE 2 - Fix massive slow down caused by activating instances while collecting papers.
- Max PE 3 - Adjusted dialogue.
- Sage PE 2 - Adjusted portraits.
- Sage PE 5D - Adjusted dialogue.
Private Detective:
- Man Hunt - Fixed ending early when NPC is spawned off screen on small screens.
- Man Hunt - Added new levels to randomisation (University, beach, farm, recycling centre, mountains, some of these are pretty hard!)
- Gather Evidence - Adjusted some wording.
- Stake Out - Fixed perfect completion text not firing in some situations.
- Fixed music not reverting after games if lost.
Festival of Petals:
- Fishing mini game - Fixed crash.
- Fixed festival shops spawning in wrong rooms or not resetting when swapping between save files..
- Fixed tree tops not displaying correctly in some situations.
- Adjusted interaction logic for stalls and added highlights where possible.
- Swan boat - Fixed swan boat backs not displaying in some situations.
- Swan boat - Fixed NPCs not showing up in boat and soft locking scenes.
Optimisations/backend:
- Timing - Replaced various smoothed dt references with raw dt for more accurate speed calculations.
- Speed - Fixed a couple of inconsistent speed issues.
- Replaced mp_grids with A* pathfinding for dynamic movement.
- Recategorised textures because they keep reverting to ignore the goddamn texture groupings.
- Removed a bunch of unused sprites.
- General code clean ups (initiatives, notifications)
- Weather - moved management and adjusted particle creation numbers, speeds etc.
- Weather - Small optimisations for speed and frequency.
- Input - refactored input to avoid local variable struct references.
- Input - adjusted various controller connection issues.
- Input - various other general fixes.
- Depth - Removed sorting running in a few situations.
- Collisions - removed unrequited collisions checks from par_decor
- UI - Converted toggles and surface dim to dot accessors and enums for speed.
- UI - Optimised rectangle coord calls to remove struct references.
- Cutscenes - added some array checks when running cutscenes for stability.
- Depth sorting - removed shops from deactivations and adjusted sorting timing.
- Cutscenes - Fixed instance activate during various cutscenes running too often.
- Player - Added sprite rebake in a few cutscenes where clothing in changed.
- Interactions - adjust outline reset.
- Inventory - Various changes to allow for stacking consumables, updating usages, destroying on consumption.
- Saves - Added better handling for user id in file handling.
- Notifications - removed various unneeded notifications.