hedgepets

The backyard (runbook)

HedgePets should look like magical creatures inhabiting an ordinary backyard, not an ordinary backyard inhabiting a magical fantasy world.

An ordinary New England backyard where suburbia gives way to the woods. Somebody actually uses it. The world is convincingly mundane, so a little shrub with eyes bouncing out of the woods is that much more delightful. docs/acceptance/backyard.png.

In the garden now

From the reference	Where
The woodland boundary: a wall of tall trees behind the fence and down the sides	garden.gd: _tree_wall, 15-22 m trees, cheap far versions, paths open at the gates
Uneven grass: sunlit patches, fallen leaves, weeds	lawn macro + blade grain, leaf litter, weeds, bald spots
The accumulated stuff	branches, sticks, the tipped chair, a woodpile against the pine, one chair standing alone mid-lawn (somebody sits here to watch Cranberry do nothing)
Afternoon light	a low warm sun with long shadows; sunflecks drifting on the lawn and grass (dapple.png in lawn / grass shaders)
The ordinary house	white siding, blue door, small steps, behind the garden gate
Scale	trees tower over the yard: small, sheltered, connected to something bigger

More of the yard

• The house that overlooks the garden has a raised back porch: a plank deck on posts at first-floor height, a white railing with balusters, stairs down the side, a lattice skirt, the blue back door at deck level (_back_porch). It will keep getting more detailed.
• New England stone walls: flat field stones in tight staggered courses on two faces, leaning in, big flat caps (stone_wall). Rounded slabs, not bricks; sizes snap to a grid, so meshes are shared.
• Long grass along every fence and wall foot and around the trunks, where the mower never reaches (_grass_edges).
• The sun follows the real time of day: east over the woods in the morning, south over the houses at midday, west past the creek in the evening, golden when low; at night a held soft dusk. Soft shafts of light slant through the trees along it, strongest when the sun is low (_build_sun, shaders/light_shaft.gdshader). HEDGEPETS_HOUR pins the hour.
• Hiding places: a paint bucket by the gate, a big terracotta pot, the old stone well, and the burrow behind the bottom-corner tree (scripts/garden/hideouts.gd).
  • A pet walks over, hops onto the rim and slides down inside. The opening fills with its own leaves over its moss, a face (two eyes with light dots) peeks out, blinks and looks around. Coming out is the same backwards.
  • Tap a hideout to coax it out.
  • The burrow is also a way in: burrowing pets (chipmunk, woodchuck, mole, mouse) arrive as a face in its doorway, climb out, and leave back down it.
• Mending: hold on the broken sprinkler or a run of the back fence (no pulling) and it’s fixed in a few seconds.
  • The sprinkler stands up and sprays in slow sweeps now and then, watering plants within reach.
  • Each fence run stands straight again; the collapsed gap becomes a pair of gates standing open.
• The barrel is emptied by the rubbish truck a few minutes after something goes in (or while you’re away). You hear it out front: the engine, the lift, the bang, the reversing beep. The barrel shakes.

Habitats (natural features, not gameplay furniture)

• Brush pile at the woodland edge: shelter for shy woodland visitors (fawn, porcupine, fisher, bobcat). Haul sticks and branches onto it and it grows (an alternative to the barrel).
• Sunlit clearing: the middle of the lawn free of junk (clearing). The robin and the turkey come when the grass is open.
• Woodpile: the chipmunk moves in.
• Woodland edge: everywhere along the fence; the woods gate is where the woodland pets come from.

The player then adds the birdbath, flowers, a nest box… and the yard gradually becomes their garden, still a real, slightly messy patch of New England underneath.

The soundscape (scripts/garden/soundscape.gd, sounds from tools/make_soundscape.py)

Birds first. A New England backyard chorus, someone singing every few seconds, never all at once:

• chickadee (“fee-bee”)
• robin (carolling)
• cardinal (“cheer cheer” / “birdy birdy”)
• song sparrow (notes and a buzzy trill)
• mourning dove (the low coo)
• blue jay (a scolding “jeer”)
• now and then a crow

Wind chimes from the neighbours’ porches, often: bright metal, a deeper set, wooden bamboo.

The neighbourhood, far off:

• a dog a couple of houses down
• a car going by out front
• somebody’s screen door
• a leaf blower now and then
• a church bell from town

Every sound comes from a place, so turning the camera turns the yard. M mutes.

Wind in the leaves: a real recording of wind in the trees at a woodland edge over gardens, one quiet minute, low rumble filtered out, looped (credit in docs/CREDITS.md). The synthesised attempts sounded like surf, then static.

The sounds are synthesised (no recordings, no network). Real CC0 recordings dropped into assets/audio/ with the same names would replace them, with no code change.