A Hero's Guide to Gardening is on iOS & itch! 🌱✨ An interactive story that guides young players in talking about emotions & taking care of their mental health.
- Tweets51
- Following145
- Followers69
- Likes64
ALT Photo of Clancy speaking at the online event, gesturing enthusiastically.
ALT Photo of a screen featuring the Hero's Guide team, Rachel Clancy, Destina Connor, Jefferson Toal, and Nick Jackson (Aida Sancho Lopez is just out of frame).
ALT Screenshot of the Our Team page of the presentation with illustrations of the hero's guide characters in place of the team members.
ALT Photo of hand-holding iPhone with A Hero's Guide to Gardening's menu on the screen.
ALT Illustration featuring the character Noomi reading the book "A Hero's guide to gardening", alongside an announcement that the game is now available to play on itch.
ALT The character cosmo the frog showing off his beautiful blue swamp garden, full of passion flowers.
ALT Cosmo thinks his garden is a total failure until he discovers that he has planted climbing Passion Flowers that need support to grow. As a character, Cosmo is very hard on himself and feels embarrassed to ask for help. He too needs support, but it takes time for him to trust Noomi because he has been excluded and rejected by friends in the past.
ALT Cosmo and Noomi learn how to take care of the Passion Flowers, and Noomi learns how to help after Cosmo when she stops pushing and starts to listen to him. Cosmo and his Passion Flowers needed a little extra patience and care to flourish, but they are both absolutely worth the effort!
ALT Typographic illustration on a green background. It reads" Even heroes need helo sometimes!".
ALT Photo of an iPhone with a picture of the characters Oriel and Noomi looking at each other on a yellow background.
ALT "Jitters will come and go while you tend to the other beautiful blooms in your garden - so take a deep breath and let the jitters fade".
ALT Illustration of grace the bat petting her giant barb blossom flower
ALT Grace has a nasty relationship with her aggressive Barb Blossoms, until she learns that they are garden guardians that only want to protect their territory. Grace’s character explores the emotion of anger, and one function of that emotion is to tell us that we find something threatening.
ALT Grace and Noomi use the Hero’s Guide to learn to get to the bottom of the Barb’s bad attitude. Grace fights fire with fire, she responded to the snappy plants by being snappy herself. When treated with kindness however, both Grace & the Barb Blossoms turn out to be big softies at heart!
ALT Learning to listen
ALT Chart showing years spent learning communication skills: Writing: 12 years Reading: 6 - 8 years Speaking 1 - 2 years Listening - 0 - 0.5 years
ALT Non-judgemental listening tips You do not have to agree with someone to listen supportively. You can check-in and reflect back to show you are listening e.g. “That sounds very hard” or “Do you find that stressful?” Give the person room to speak. Silence can be very supportive.
ALT Photo of conversation between Noomi & Seta in Hero's Guide on the iPad.
ALT Barriers to Listening Minimising “It’s not so bad!” “It could be worse!” This could make the speaker feel guilty for not being able to cope. Centring ourselves “When that happened to me I felt...” Turns conversation away from the speaker.
ALT Barriers to Listening Jumping into advice We might feel compelled to tell the person what we think they “should” do, but this can shut the speaker down before they are finished. Interrupting Give the speaker a chance to speak! It might be hard for them to get the words out, silence can be supportive.