The Endearing World of Garage Sale

Garage Sale and its Director, Amelia Zollner, Prove the Importance of Indie Developers who Produce Heartfelt Gaming Experiences

In Garage Sale, which saw release last June on Steam, you play as kid-next-door Juniper living in Lettuce Village: an adorable yet mysterious town away from the suburban life of Salad City. The player inhabits Juniper on her first day out by herself as she travels between the homes of her plant-loving – worrisome – father, and her crafty mother on Garage Sale Day. You are tasked with carrying out quests to help the village folk whilst making new friends along the way. With a completion time of around two hours, the game is simple in its concept and mechanics; but has been carried out with immense heart and respect to its own characters. Undeniably, Garage Sale is an example of a simple format done right.

Beginning Garage Sale, the player is greeted by Juniper’s bedroom and an endearing pixelated art style, complete with a sleeping cat, setting up the overall tone of this cosy game. Going through the first couple of quests I quickly became familiar with the game’s main mechanics; collect an item and return it to the person that asked you to fetch it. Of course, it’s a repetitive formula, and one that sometimes left me desiring a task that was more complex and interactive, such as a puzzle or a mini game. However, with the game’s short runtime, the lack of different tasks wasn’t a huge issue, especially when the personality of the characters and their reactions to Juniper make the quests so worthwhile. Exploring the world whilst you collect items for the characters is something that I found extremely fulfilling, and I was pleased to see that Juniper could interact with absolutely everything  – from the worms scattered around Lettuce Village to the unique items in each house. Plus, if you’re anything like me and have been trained to collect every single item you see through games like Stardew Valley, backtracking isn’t an issue.

Comedy is a strong point for Garage Sale, whether you’re enabling a fish romance to take place or dealing with a headstrong girl aptly named Princess, Garage Sale has a memorable cast of characters that you can form friendships with, similar to games like Undertale. The game also has animal characters which I found very charming, including a family of cats who own a bakery and a dog family who run a small medical clinic. However, what I appreciated most about Lettuce Village’s residents is the diversity in family structures; Juniper is child whose parents are divorced yet healthily co-parent together, Princess lives with her single father, Nadia has two mothers, Juniper’s teacher appears to be a newly single mother who lives with her sister, the list goes on. This representation was such a wonderful touch to Garage Sale, and one that shouldn’t be ignored. The different family structures also tied into the main message of the game – community and connection.

Towards the end of the game, by helping and becoming friends with everyone in town, as well as buying some garage sale trinkets from your neighbours along the way, Juniper is able to meet the spirit of the town’s founder, LV, who reminds Juniper of her roots that connect her to everyone in Lettuce Village. This idea forms the heart of Garage Sale, that through community and connection with others, no matter the distance, Juniper, and by extension the player, is never alone. It’s an impactful message for such a short, yet sweet, game, and as Juniper heads to bed in her mother’s house her room is filled with the items she has collected along her journey, a lovely reminder of everyone in Lettuce Village.

After my playthrough I was lucky enough to talk to Amelia Zollner, the director and one of the writers on Garage Sale, to discover more about the team behind the game, Bug Burrow.

Amelia, how did the initial idea for Garage Sale come to fruition?

So, I played Undertale for the first time and was very late to the party! I played it in 2020 or 2021 and was like, oh my god, this is the coolest thing ever – it made me feel all these emotions that no other media had ever made me feel. Afterwards, I looked into the creator and realised it was all made pretty much by one guy, which made me feel like even though I wasn’t a programmer or a game designer, I could still create a game. So I decided to start making Garage Sale as a solo project based off of my own childhood experiences, originally using a browser engine called bitsy which requires no programming at all. I was working on it for a summer but realised I needed help creating an inventory system and I wanted to include music, so I took it to my school’s game development club, which was very out of my comfort zone, and gave a pitch. Some people wanted to join the team, and from there, one guy working on the soundtrack was like “we should make this into an actual game”. We switched engines and started making the game from scratch in a programme called Godot, now two and a half years later we have a game!

Is Bug Burrow just a team of friends who wanted to create something together?

I actually didn’t know a lot of the people on the team before we started, since it was formed at my school’s game development club. The two programmers on our team I met through the club, then one of the artists and another one of the writers were my friends who I dragged to the club with me like “come watch me do my little pitch I’m scared!”. After that initial meeting though we all became super close. I’m sad that we don’t have regular meetings anymore since we’re done with the game, but the meetings were always super fun, I loved it.

The core message of community and our connection with others, is this something that was instilled in the game from the beginning?

That message was a product of the development process, it wasn’t what I originally intended it to be. When I started making the game alone it was going to be totally different; Juniper, the main character, was going to be older and about to leave for college – which was what was going on in my life at the time. The game was going to be a lot sadder, way less wholesome, about loneliness. There wasn’t necessarily going to be a resolution. But because when I got to college I had such a fantastic time meeting people that I never thought I’d be friends with, which extends to the development team, the message shifted because I was thinking so much about community and the wonderful little group of friends I had – the game just naturally changed into this more wholesome idea.

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Did any other games inspire Garage Sale?

Definitely Undertale! But the initial inspiration for how the game worked was from Animal Crossing: Wild World, which has a flea market day where the villagers sell some of the items in their houses. It was a niche mechanic and I always thought it was super fun, but I wished some of the villagers would talk more about the items they were selling – I always thought about where these items came from or if they were super attached to them, I wanted to know more. So I took this initial inspiration and started to add a story. I was also inspired by a lot of walking simulators like What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch, and A Short Hike; I wanted to encapsulate this feeling of exploration. And then, of course, everyone is like “your game looks like Stardew Valley!” I didn’t take direct inspiration from Stardew, but I think subconsciously when creating this forest town vibe it naturally lent itself to the aesthetic Stardew Valley claimed. We get a lot of Stardew comparisons but I love it, some of the other artists on the team probably referenced the game.

This game has so much heart and personality – are there any characters in the game inspired by real life people?

Since the game started out as my own little solo project about my life and as an outlet for my own worries about college, I think Juniper is pretty similar to me – I grew up with divorced parents, I was always a bit scared of making new friends, and Juniper’s dad (unintentionally) also looks exactly like my dad! I would say Nadia is definitely a little similar to me too, just because she’s the “newspaper girl” and I would always make little newspapers when I was growing up. Everyone else on the team also threw in little bits of their childhood into the characters. Nobody is directly based on anybody, but since we all played a role in the writing a lot of the characters ended up being similar to members of the development team.

What’s next for Bug Burrow?

Oh my gosh, I have no idea. We made Garage Sale with literally with no funding. It’s hard to find the time for a project like this, especially when most of us are going into our last year of college. I think we all need a break from working on games constantly, I was working in lectures and pulling all-nighters, and I don’t want to do that to myself in my senior year. At the same time though, through Garage Sale I kind of learnt how to program, which I didn’t expect to do, but now through that skillset I want to try making a super small solo project using an actual engine rather than bitsy, but I don’t know if that would fall under the Bug Burrow name. Maybe we would end up making something else together? I don’t really know!

G.URL would like to thank Amelia for their time!

The Bug Burrow Team:

• Amelia Zollner — Director, Writer, Artist, Programmer
• Rishit Khare — Lead Programmer, Lead Composer, Artist, Writer
• Jennifer Kim — Programmer, Artist
• Josie Ronk — Artist, Writer
• Allie Carlson — Writer