Gardens Interactive: Building Worlds for Social Roleplay

Twice a year, the people building Gardens Interactive's shared fantasy world spend time together away from their screens. The distributed studio's 2025 gatherings took colleagues to Santa Fe and Santa Cruz, a practical response to the difficulty of building creative rapport entirely through remote work.

That attention to relationships also runs through Gardens Interactive's product. The Los Angeles-based studio is developing an unrevealed social roleplaying adventure in which encounters and player choices can change what other visitors experience. Cofounders Stephen Bell, CEO, Chris Bell, Creative Director, and Lexie Dostal, CTO, are combining authored game design with systems intended to accommodate unpredictable human behavior.

Gardens' $35M+ Series B, led by Lightspeed, supplies timely context for that work. The company remains in closed pre-alpha and lists a current technical design opening. For builders and operators, the studio offers a concrete example of how product architecture, community research and the way a team collaborates can become parts of the same development problem.

About Gardens Interactive and the team behind the world

Gardens' official press kit dates the company's founding to May 2021. Stephen Bell also serves as Narrative Director; Chris Bell and Lexie Dostal carry co-design responsibilities alongside creative and technical leadership. That combination places story, systems and player interaction close to the founding team rather than treating them as disconnected departments.

Chris Bell's design credits include Journey, Sky: Children of the Light, What Remains of Edith Finch and Way. Those earlier projects help explain the studio's interest in how people experience a world and relate to others within it. They establish relevant experience, while Gardens' own audience response will have to emerge from the new game.

Transcend Fund's account describes backing the founders before a playable prototype existed. It also traces the relationship through the subsequent development and fundraising cycle. The account comes from an investor with an interest in the company, but it gives readers a useful view of a studio that has spent years turning a social design premise into a working project.

The current company is distributed rather than organized around a single studio floor. That makes shared judgment an operating concern: people creating levels, technology, art and narrative need ways to understand each other's choices. Gardens' public material connects that need to deliberate collaboration, both online and during periodic gatherings.

A world built from authored experiences and procedural systems

Gardens describes its debut game as a social roleplaying fantasy adventure. Its strandbox concept allows player actions to leave effects that later travelers encounter, even when those players never meet. The intended experience gives an individual's choices significance beyond the immediate session.

Underneath that design sits Petri, the studio's proprietary world engine and matchmaker. In the company's current explanation, Petri combines procedural generation and hand-authored content while supporting an evolving world. Those are the developer's descriptions of its technology; no independently measured production-scale performance is disclosed.

The interesting design boundary lies between what a system can generate and what the team needs to author carefully. Repeatedly creating terrain can expand the space available to explore, while memorable interactions require judgment about how players understand an opportunity, a risk or another person's intention. Gardens is trying to make those approaches work together inside a coherent adventure.

That also shapes how a studio should interpret surprise. An unexpected use of an object may reveal a delightful possibility or a confusing rule. The development job includes deciding which discoveries deserve to become part of the experience and which undermine it, without assuming that every deviation from the original plan is a mistake.

Playtesting brings different kinds of players into development

Gardens' 2025 studio recap describes regular external playtests and collaboration with DAQA on recruiting participants, surveys and reports. The team sought players with different interests, including combat, exploration and social activity. That is a relevant mix for a product whose experience depends on how people respond to one another.

Feedback from those groups can expose different versions of the same world. A system that seems clear to a combat-focused player may be opaque to someone interested in wandering or meeting strangers. Bringing those perspectives into development helps the team examine assumptions before treating its own preferred play style as universal.

The recap also documents conversations with potential publishing partners and vendors supporting tasks such as localization and moderation. These relationships matter because a shared online game reaches players through more than its core mechanics. The studio's descriptions establish work on those relationships without confirming a final publisher, distribution agreement or specific operating model.

Gardens is accepting applications for closed pre-alpha playtests. Its materials do not establish a consumer release date, final platform list, revenue or public retention curve. The available evidence describes a team testing and preparing a product, with commercial performance still ahead of it.

Culture and hiring reveal the work the studio is organizing

On its careers page, Gardens describes a collaborative, transparent and inclusive distributed environment. It lists stock options, nonaccrual paid time off and medical, vision, dental and retirement benefits. These are the company's stated employment policies, rather than an independent assessment of employee experience.

The current listing is for a Technical Game Designer focused on levels, with US-remote eligibility across Eastern to Pacific time. A specific design vacancy is a narrower signal than broad claims about a hiring surge. It identifies work the studio is seeking to fill while leaving headcount plans and expansion rates undisclosed.

For a builder considering the opportunity, the useful connection is between the role and the product. Level design helps determine where people meet, how a landscape communicates choices and what players can understand about each other's actions. In Gardens' case, those questions sit near the central social premise rather than at the edge of the experience.

The company's account of twice-yearly gatherings supplies another piece of the operating picture. A team that works apart still needs shared context for decisions that cross disciplines. Gardens is assembling that context while outside players keep introducing their own ideas about what the world should allow, giving designers and colleagues new material to work through together.