A few months after its release, the reviews are in for Garage Sale, an indie game created by a small group of UW-Madison students.
Garage Sale is a refreshing experience where players can interact with other characters and help them with small tasks within a close-knit community, being afforded opportunities to display compassion and kindness.
Leading members Amelia Zollner and Rishit Khare previously shared their experience with the ongoing creation of Garage Sale with The Daily Cardinal in March. After the game’s release, they reflected on the process of putting the project together.
The evolution of Garage Sale
The concept of Garage Sale is a series of quests that allows the main character to explore the cozy Lettuce Village and develop connections with other characters on the town’s garage sale day. Zollner initially planned for the game to be more sad, reflecting the emotions she felt moving from her home town to college her freshman year..
“It had a totally different vibe. It was going to be a melancholy game about saying goodbye to the town you’re living in. I was getting ready to leave for college and was honestly worried about college,” Zollner said.
Khare felt similarly while being far from home. When Zollner shared her idea for Garage Sale with the game club at UW-Madison, he was all in, drawn to the sense of community the game presented.
After Zollner began meeting new people at college, joining clubs and working on Garage Sale with her newly formed team, the game evolved into something more joyous and rewarding, a place where people could find welcoming connection. It’s one of the elements of Garage Sale that touched the creators and continues to draw the interest of players.
“That sense of community was a constant throughout the developing process,” Khare said.
Zollner and Khare faced many challenges in creating Garage Sale, from balancing school and other commitments, managing technical details and testing the game with prospective players.
Zollner, who’d had no prior coding experience, had to overcome quite a few learning curves.
“I had never made a game before, so I had to learn everything. Even at the end, I was learning completely new stuff,” she said.
When I had met with Zollner and Khare in March before the game’s release, they had only completed two rounds of testing and were preparing for their third. They shared details of the final testing stage before releasing Garage Sale, which involved a group of 35 people who they thought would be a good fit for the game.
“We tried to find people who would bring unique perspectives, people who have worked on larger games and knew more about the gaming industry,” Zollner said.
After working through various bugs, reworking art on some of the rooms and a lot of hard work, Garage Sale was finally ready for release.
“We had to pull a crazy all-nighter, technically two all-nighters, in a row,” Zollner said.
Post release
A few months out from the release, Zollner and Khare seemed both relieved and satisfied with the final product and its reception. Khare called the experience “liberating.”
The Two had worked on since their freshman year. Now seniors, they’d finally reached their goal.
“I was pretty freaked out that people would find a lot of bugs,” Zollner said. “But then the days and weeks following the release, I realized people weren’t really having a lot of issues about it. People were leaving a lot of really positive reviews.”
Although Zollner didn’t want to share numbers to avoid comparing the game’s success to that of games with larger funding, she said she’s content with the results.
“I’ve been super happy with the response to it. We’ve seen a lot more people playing the game than we’ve expected to,” she said.
The two are not worried about sales. For Zollner and Khare, the game’s success lies in its ability to offer a sense of fulfillment to its players and give them the sense of community that the duo found in creating Garage Sale.
“There’s something really special about making something that affects someone so deeply and personally that they genuinely shed tears at the ending,” Khare said.
The ending was another aspect of the game that changed since its original conception. Once players have finished all the quests, the game unlocks one last challenge for the player, a culminating quest that wraps up the story and ties everything together.
“At the end, it acknowledges all the effort you’ve put in,” Khare said.
Khare recruited Zollner to his team for an upcoming game jam, but for now they’re taking a break from starting another extensive project. They expressed excitement and interest in continuing working together in the future. For now, they’re letting themselves enjoy the rewarding experience it has been after seeing Garage Sale through to completion.
“It’s very cool to see people playing the game and enjoying it and sharing it with their friends, streaming it, posting it,” Zollner said. “It’s just really cool to see that response with what we’ve made without the intention of it being this big.”
