Children’s Cultural Centre Kotilo commissioned us to create a game for their celebratory exhibition of the 20th Lumotut sanat literary art festival in Oulu. The exhibition, Varjossa kukkiva auringon poika, is based on the words and worlds of poet and artist Jukka Itkonen. So is the game, titled Gardener or Puutarhuri in Finnish.

Camilla was selected to be the festival’s illustrator of the year 2026. Previously she’s had the chance to collaborate with Itkonen on four different books and Gardener takes its main inspiration from Kaikki hyvin kasvimaalla (All Good in the Garden) which Itkonen wrote and Camilla illustrated. Itkonen liked to imagine: what’s it like to be some other creature? We wanted to let the players do that too.

Gardener is an eight player local multiplayer game which the players join with their own mobile device. They pick one of the bug characters and use a simple joystick to move around the garden. Each bug reacts to different things inside their garden home and all have their own tasks which need attending to. Snails need to eat leaves and ants deliver vegetables. Worms and bees can help new vegetables grow, so the tasks can also overlap. After enough tasks are completed a raspberry spawns. Eating the raspberry results in the players receiving a poem, delivered to them by a caterpillar living inside a pumpkin.

Developing the game we had some goals in mind.
1. Make the game simple to pick up and play so all visitors could test it.
2. Make it fun so… people like to play it!
3. Make it boring enough so visitors want to experience other artworks too.
Observing the people who visited during the opening we are certain we succeeded in all three. Least so in the last goal. As simple as we made the game, it proved captivating. Most surprising and delightful things happened when players started to collaborate and make up their own games within the game, like playing tag.

All the game graphics were hand drawn and painted, then scanned, and finally assembled as characters and animated inside the game engine. As always, we used Godot. The original paintings were also used by Camilla to build dioramas. Installed into the exhibition, finding them encourages visitors to be curious about their surroundings and to discover that the characters have somehow escaped the game. Eino Korkala and Daniel Coull created a font based on the handwriting of Itkonen. It was used for all text inside the game and exhibition.

Gardener is playable in galley Kotilo until 5.9.2026. Multiplayer games in galleries bring people together and those people are happy to give their time and attention when the game is engaging. There is a lot of potential here which we’ll surely tap into in the future. Check out some of the gameplay in the video below!