The Abbess Garden news & patch notes

The release is now behind us, so I finally have the time to write this news :) I want to say a big thank you to every player who supported and bought the game!!! It means a lot to us :)

Spy rendez-vous!

The Spy Video Game Rendezvous is starting today on Steam for its second edition!!! https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45263338/sale/SpyVideoGameRendezvous2026

I have made a special trailer for the showcase!

Although The Abbess Garden looks like an outlier there, I'm happy as it allows us to talk about our spy plot 🕵️‍♀️ If you are curious about real spies, I interview the curator of Port-Royal des Champs, Nathalie Genet-Rouffiac, about real spies of the 17th century:She did her PhD on spies in British islands in the 17th century and worked for a while as head researcher for WWII spy archives, so she really is a specialist of real spies (and Port-Royal, where the game takes place ;) ).

Updates since the release

I have made 5 small updates since the release: MacOs porting, bug fixes, plants table of content, seeds UI improvement, and cursor changing according tor actions (see below)!

These were mostly done as the request of players who posted in the Steam forum, on our Discord or answered to our previous survey (see the new one below ;) ).

Thanks again for the feedback! I hope you find the game more pleasant now :)

More updates to come!

The next update I'll be working on is the zoom in, and the hiding of the tree when the character is behind it. We have a small Google Form survey about the next updates based on players' and our ideas :)

In addition to updating the game, we have begun working on a new game... It will have a lot in common with The Abbess Garden, but still be rather different 👀 If you are curious, head over to our Discord or Newsletter, where we'll be talking about it soon...

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Reviews still matter a lot to us :) So if you played the game and have a few minutes to spare, we would appreciate it a lot :)

I wish you all an excellent day !!!

Edwige

• Issues with the arrow keys (now the down key effectively goes down)
• The seeds submenu is now properly centred
• The maximum speed has been reduced to prevent players from going out of the garden ;)

Dear players,

I am running a survey to know what updates players are most interested in.

The most requested small improvement was a table of contents for the plants in the book! It has now be added!

Seeds UI

Making the seed list have a maximum width and being scrollable, so it's never hard to select seeds, even when you have a lot of them!

Have a nice day! Edwige

Dear players, That's it! The game is out in the wild Many thanks to the team, everyone who supported us in the journey, and to the players who bought the game already! 💖 If you played, we would particularly appreciate it if you could spend a few mins reviewing the game, it's very important to indie devs! And to those who already review, please know you have our eternal gratitude!!!

Team meeting at Port-Royal des Champs

As you might know, the game takes place at Port-Royal des Champs Abbey, which was destroyed several centuries ago, and is now a national museum. It's possible to visit both the ruins of the abbey and the museum, which has a lot of great paintings that inspired us to design our characters. As a team party, we met there with the team, all together in person for the first time! (We were working remotely on the game from Italy and 4 different regions of France ;) ) It's something that was planned very last minute, and I'm very grateful we got to meet!

Survey: What features or improvements would you like to see in the game?

As there are not so many bugs (yay!), I can already think of what feature to add to the game. So I created a small survey to gauge players' interest! Small improvements take from a day to a week of work, while the big features will take from 2 weeks to 2 months. Let me know what you think!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeGIwvOsnO9vakqyPklYSlq_42wwy7I-RZgfZl1ie2FxRAq_A/viewform?usp=header (Edit: new survey!)

We will soon begin working on the next game in parallel with updating The Abbess Garden, too!

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I wish you all an excellent day :) Edwige

Dear players,

We are in the final week before the game release!

We recently had the good news that the game was reviewed as Playable on Steam Deck :) It's not verified as some text are a bit small, but every one who tested it said it was actually fine :) (Steam is rather strict ;) ). To get to that result we added a bunch of settings including key rebinding which might be helpful also for other people.

As the demo was not updated, it doesn't reflect the final game and will be withdrawn before launch, so if you want to give it a try, now is a good time! Please note that all the UI changes and the Steam Deck compatibility are not in the demo. Sorry about that!

The game is content complete (which means it's possible to finish the game) since January 15th. Since that, we are fixing bugs and polishing the game a lot. As an example, we just added Steam Achievements! We hope you'll like them!

We also worked on the UI, as some part were not very pretty ;) Here a an example of the Inventory before:

And after: We hope you'll like the improvements and the game!

The launch trailer is also ready! Can't wait to be able to share it with you!

Many thanks to every player who tried our game, shared feedback and said nice words during the developments, it's very motivating!

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I wish you all an excellent day :) Edwige

New partnership with indie.io

I have been interested in games for natural & cultural heritage for a while. When I created MD Studio in 2024, I decided that my first game would be a gardening game with real plants set in Port-Royal des Champs in the 17th century. I knew this abbey very well, as my friend and colleague Sylvain Hilaire had done his PhD on the history of its landscape.

As The Abbess Garden is our first game and this is a self-funded project, I decided to gather a tiny team and stay focused on the game, without trying to apply for grants or publisher funding.

Two months ago, I was contacted by indie.io, a company specialising in helping indie games with marketing and distribution. It was very unexpected, so we looked at who they are and what they do (also took a very close look at the contract ;) ). indie.io is based in USA, with team members working remotely from all around the country. They have worked with several nice cozy games, which they have helped reach more gamers.

They offered to help us notably with marketing (doing the trailers, running ads, reaching out to press and content creators…) and QA testing. I found that very interesting, as I was doing it all myself. It’s not my speciality, so even though I do my best, I cannot replace an experienced team. As you can guess, I liked the idea of focusing on creating the game’s content! 

They offer a lot more services, but these are the ones which made me consider their offer seriously. 

So I talked to the team and decided to join forces with indie.io 🙂 As you can imagine, we are very excited by this opportunity!

We have already begun working together: you might have noticed a few improvements on our Steam page!

Release date!

For The Abbess Garden’s release, we discussed it with indie.io as soon as the partnership was established, and I am very proud to announce we decided to go for March 2 2026!!!

We are getting close to the completion of the game, so that leaves us time for QA and polish, and to send preview keys to the press and influencers ahead of the release. It’s actually both far and very close ;)

We have prepared a new trailer to announce it with indie.io, I hope you’ll like it!

Women-Led Games 2025

The Women-Led Games Steam Festival just started! It features games where at least 50% team members are women/nb :) The Abbess Garden's demo is in there :) And a lot more cozy games!

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Don’t forget we have a Discord (I share regular tiny updates there ;) ) and a newsletter (for in-depth updates), and be sure to wishlist and follow the game to stay up to date with future news!

I wish you an excellent day, with a lot of sun and flowers 🌸

Dear players,

I was invited to the Utopiales festival recently. It was initially mostly about sci-fi, but it has become more open to fiction in general. There is a video game area, and the professional gamedev association my studio is part of (Atlangames) helps with organising it.

The Utopiales are held in Nantes, the biggest city of my region, which is very pleasant and which I hadn't visited in a while! The weather was nice, so I took a few pictures of the Château des Ducs de Bretagne :)

I participated in a Twitch livestream on the Utopiales channel (hosted by Moustique and Le_Technicien 💖), it was my first and a very good experience!

Then I presented The Abbess Garden in a workshop where visitors playtested the game (organised by Chloe, a fellow indie developer of Eode). It was organized in the historical buildings of LU (a brand well known here for their "petit beurre"). Cultural heritage is everywhere ;)

The new part for me was that there were a lot of children, and the game being only in English made me do a lot of live translation ;) It was still very fun and useful!

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In the meantime, we are working on finishing the game's content. Giovanni is writing the dialogs while I am modeling, texturing, rendering/drawing (for the icons and book) and integrating the plants in Unity.

I don't want to spoil to much, so here it's just one plant, one of my favourites (the first plant I bought as a kid ;) ): the columbine! It's probably a bit too much detailed considering it's only seen from afar in the game, but it was very interesting to model!

Let me know what your favourite plants are!

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I wish you all an excellent day :)

Dear players! The new demo is out!!! Yay!!!

It includes a lot of improvements, new content, and a new gardening system, which I want to introduce to you today!

To make the gardening complexity progressive, there are only very easy plants at the beginning of the game. They need an appropriate quantity of water.

The more you progress into the game, the more you will be given fussy plants ;) From chapter 3 onwards, in addition to water, you will need to verify that the plants are in an area with the right soil, too. You can now examine the soil to plant them in the area with appropriate soil, or plant them anywhere and add the specific soil they want.

There are 4 types of soil (humus, gravel, sand, clay). Some areas will have some of it already, and there are several "surfacing soil" areas that you use to dig up some soil to add to another place. Beware, you cannot remove soil from the ground, and it will remain this way for several months! Like water, you can move the plants, but not the soil. It is, of course, a simplified simulation system. I hope you'll like it and it will add interesting depth to our gardening systems :) Let us know what you think! The last system is the proximity system (for the very fussy plants that like to be alone, near a specific plant, etc. ;) ). It will be in the full game!

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I wish you all an excellent day :)

Hi!

The last devlog was about the demo release! It went pretty well and we are happy :)

359 players tried it so far, and 29 answered our demo survey (very useful, thank you!!!)

There weren't too many bugs, but I still had to fix some collision and saving issues. I also added a small quality-of-life improvement feature: you can now change the music and sound effects volume in the settings :)

I was on holiday most of the month (rest is important too!!!) and I'm getting back to working on The Abbess Garden today, with a fun event: Back To School 2025!

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44695353/sale/BacktoSchoolGamesCelebration2025

It's a festival with games for learning and productivity tools! 📖🖊️ There are several themes in the fest. The Abbess Garden is in "Environment and Nature" as it is about gardening real plants in a real setting, with some elements of simulation (water, soil and proximity systems).

It could have been in the "History" theme as well, but the 17th century in Port-Royal is not in many schools' curricula ;) (Probably only known to French literature and French history majors nowadays ;) )

It is organised by the indie devs of Mooncube Games, who created Spirit City :)

I hope this will inspire you and help you discover new and interesting games!

🌿🌿🌿 I have a lot planned for the end of August and September! Giovanni (our awesome writer) will be cooking the new version of the demo, with 2 more chapters, more plants, and a lot more systems (soil, plant reproduction and harvesting). I also have a long todo list of improvements to implement based on players' feedback 😱 And another festival too 🎉 So it's good that I feel energised ahah ;)

Please keep playing and sharing our demo 💖 It helps a lot!

If you are going back to school (or work), I wish you an excellent start to the new school year! Learning new things is great for happiness, so I wish you to discover a lot of new knowledge and skills!

Edwige

This morning, I clicked on the "Released Demo" button, it was a scary and exciting moment! :) And now, the demo is here!

It has improved UI, new character animations, new music and sounds effects... (+ a lot of bugfixes ;) ) So July had been a very busy month, trying to improve the game as much as possible based on the beta tests feedback :)

We hope you'll enjoy it!!!

Several content creators picked it up already! We are so excited!

If you want to stay informed, you can still wishlist and follow our Steam page, or subscribe to our newsletter :) https://theabbessgarden.eo.page/newsletter

We also have a Discord server now (very fresh, opened a week ago) https://discord.gg/zbsHNuAF

Have a nice day!

Edwige

Many thanks to the playtesters who registered for our beta test! (more than 400!!!). The feedback allowed us to understand what the most pressure issues were patch the game 5 times :)

They were all related to what playtesters reported during the alpha and closed beta:

• better character movement: Agnès is not looking away anymore from what she is examining, and she doesn't walk too far. Also, she is not weirdly leaning backwards anymore!

  ( picture of the lean backwards bug 😱 )

• fix the saving bugs (as there was only 1 chapter previously available to test, players didn't test it much before the closed beta, where it's longer).

• popup to let players know what's missing to complete a chapter (objectives, dialogues or replanting)

• adjustable walking speed! This one really annoyed the testers ;)

• particles to highlight collections (some people didn't realise there was stuff to pick in the grass besides plants ;) )

• and more!

We know that everything is not perfect (yet! ;) ), but we still had great feedback that made us very happy:

If you want to participate, there is still one day left: I'll be closing the beta test on Wednesday, July 8th, at 2 pm GMT. To register, click on "Request Access" on our Steam page (below ;) )

After that, I will remove the visibility of the Playtest, as well as the special keys that the alpha testers and newsletter subscribers got.

During this month, I will be working on two new major improvements: planting seeds visuals (removing the grass and changing the colour of the soil), and fixing water visuals, making it clearer. These are two of the most pressing issues (according to players and us) that we still need to fix!

Then, I will polish the game to get the demo ready and send demo review keys to content creators!

We hope they will like it :)

If you want to be informed of the demo release date, wishlist, follow or subscribe to our newsletter :) https://theabbessgarden.eo.page/newsletter Have a nice day! Edwige

Recently, we have been busy adding content to the game and fixing bugs to get the closed beta ready! 

To apply, click on the big green “Request Access” button on our Steam page! Then I’ll be adding playtesters regularly in the days to come.

If you are in the closed playtest, you can invite 3 of your Steam friends, and they will be accepted immediately :)

In the Closed Beta, you can play the first three chapters, right from the start, in March 1643 :) There are new plants and characters to discover too!

For instance, you can meet the Musketeers! 

The closed beta is less polished than the demo will be: it's still testing! We have a huge todo list of things to improve before the demo is ready. 

If you do test, please fill out the survey, it helps a lot!

Also, we now have a few social accounts you can follow us on if you like 🙂

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mossy.dragon.s

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mossy.dragon.studio/

Youtube:

I wish you an excellent day!

Alpha tests

Next newsletter: Music and Laurène Telennaria!

Another cozy game at the Showcase: The Merry Fairy