Inside the Melbourne studio: a tour in eleven objects
A converted warehouse, a shelf of broken music boxes, and the napkin that started a game — a photo tour of where The Gardens Between actually gets made.
The studio doesn't look like a game company from the street. It looks like a warehouse — because it is one, a converted space in inner Melbourne where the trams provide the soundtrack and the rain provides the reference footage.
Visitors always photograph the same eleven things. This is the tour, in the order they'd see them.
Studio Editorial
Long-form writing from the Gardens Between World team — guides, essays and the occasional confession from development.
In this article
- The napkin
- The shelf of broken music boxes
- The island graveyard notebook
- Visit (sort of)
The napkin
Framed above the coffee machine: the original sketch — a spiral of childhood around a lamppost, drawn at a Fitzroy café in 2014. It survives because the café's napkin dispenser gave out the good thick ones that day. The game's entire structure is legible in it, which alarms visiting designers.
Under it, the coffee machine — the studio's second most important piece of development hardware, after the rain.
The shelf of broken music boxes
Composer Tim Shiel keeps every music box he destroyed finding the main theme's mechanism. There are four. The fifth sits beside them, intact — the one whose limp finally sounded right.
The island graveyard notebook
A battered notebook labelled 'graveyard' in marker: forty deleted islands, with one dog-eared page marked 'maybe someday'. The v2.0 update quietly emptied two pages of it. The studio won't say which.
The rest of the tour
- The trophy shelf — deliberately next to the kettle.
- The rain window — where weather reference gets filmed.
- The fan mail wall — the real reason everyone works late.
Visit (sort of)
The studio isn't open to the public — it's a working space, not a showroom — but community visits happen occasionally around launch events. The contacts page is the right door if you're in Melbourne and very polite about it.
Keep reading: More about the studio · Write to the studio
Made in this warehouse
The game, the soundtrack, the artbook — from A$7.99.