Garden Idle House Jam

Private house-jam prototype for a small idle gardening game. The current beta can be shared by direct link with a small trusted playtest group; it is not a public jam entry or commercial release.

Project Navigation

• Open prototype/index.html to play the current prototype.
• Open dev/index.html for the local document library, visual roadmap, research checklist, and development log.
• Read DEPLOYMENT.md for release, feedback, rollback, and save-compatibility maintenance.
• Read design/vision.md for the game promise and design pillars.
• Read design/nurturing-idle-direction.md for the current correction toward safe idle growth, attentive-care momentum, plant continuity, and visual display.
• Read design/nurturing-idle-todo.md for the ordered implementation and playtest checklist.
• Read design/nurturing-idle-baseline.md for the Phase 0 measurements and reproducible QA states.
• Read design/event-system.md for the implemented competition slice and its next market increment.
• Read design/system-backlog.md for accepted, exploratory, deferred, and rejected ideas.
• Read research/learning-board.md for assigned games, real-world references, and reflection prompts.
• Read notes/dev-log.md for short chronological progress; durable decisions remain in notes/decision-log.md.
• Read notes/playtest-feedback-02.md for the first sanitized online-feedback inbox and its discussion status.
• Read notes/playtest-feedback-03.md for the second mobile feedback round and the F12-F18 decisions.

Markdown files remain the editable record. Dev Garden renders them as readable local pages with navigation and keeps the planning tools separate from the player-facing game. After editing documentation, run node dev/build-docs.cjs to refresh the reading pages.

Project boundary:

• No public jam submission.
• Only a small link-based playtest build; no public jam submission, storefront release, or commercial use.
• No company assets, code, accounts, or infrastructure.
• The first goal is to test whether the core loop feels good.

First Prototype

Open prototype/index.html in a browser.

Core loop:

1. Choose a seed.
2. Plant it in an empty pot.
3. Keep water inside that plant's comfortable range.
4. Let growth spend soil nutrients.
5. Healthy care and rich soil increase the number of flowers on one plant.
6. During bloom, sell at any time, cut flowers into material inventory, or wait for visitors while freshness and price decline.
7. Return declined plants to soil for seed and compost.
8. Combine common and rare flower materials into higher-value permanent orders.
9. Build a temporary specialist bed with acidic substrate or garden lime to create hydrangea color variants.
10. Use compost to restore pot nutrients.

First Scope

Included:

• 6 plants: mint, calendula, moonflower, wildberry flower, hydrangea, and wheel-limited borage.
• 4 visitors: bee, aphid, ladybug, sparrow.
• Seeds, coins, observation notes, compost, and persistent flower-material inventory.
• Plant-specific water ranges, recoverable care stress, and finite bloom periods.
• Persistent pot nutrients and a compost recovery loop.
• Ordinary soil plus temporary acidic and alkaline specialist beds configured only while a bed is empty.
• Hydrangea blooms and materials change between blue, purple, and pink with soil profile. All three colors feed repeatable orders; specialist beds last for three completed harvests, while ordinary potting soil remains free and permanent.
• Visitors can sometimes bring ordinary or rare seeds.
• Visitors are recorded automatically and level up as collectible cards.
• Coins from flower sales can buy a simple waterer with limited trigger-based durability.
• Once tools unlock, the equipment catalog previews temporary irrigation, expansion, the permanent central tank, and automatic soil care with visible prices, prerequisites, and coin shortfalls.
• Manual watering and draining resolve a pot to that species' comfortable midpoint in one action.
• Aphids can be rinsed off immediately instead of forcing the player to watch an untreated infestation.
• Flower-bed expansion opens six and later eight total planting positions.
• Expanding to six positions reveals a permanent central tank that automates dry-pot watering.
• Sparrow wildberry-seed attempts build visible clues and guarantee discovery by the eighth attempt.
• Replaceable CSS placeholders show seed, growth, bloom, decline, and visiting motion.
• Rare visitor seeds appear in a dedicated discovery card.
• Pot cards use a shared contextual action bar instead of repeating every button.
• Greenhouse and order reminders act as direct navigation: urgent care selects the next relevant bed, while order guidance opens the matching workspace.
• Mobile seed controls state how many species are currently plantable. Players can either select a seed globally for repeated planting or choose from an empty pot and plant into that specific bed immediately.
• Selected beds route owned drippers to installation and otherwise link directly to irrigation equipment. Soil profiles remain visible on beds through both color accents and text labels.
• A saved three-speed control offers quiet 0.1×, normal 1×, and fast 4× growth; pause remains separate.
• Compost, visitor records, and tools appear only after they become relevant.
• A flower-material panel appears after the first stored harvest, with progressively revealed permanent orders.
• A Spring Grower's Cup appears after the first completed order, with a persistent invitation, two event pots, four planting rounds, score previews, automatic judging reveal, soft failure recovery, and bloom-duration ribbons.
• When hydrangea is selected for the Cup, each empty event pot exposes a compact soil choice. Ordinary soil produces purple; one stored acidic substrate or garden lime produces blue or pink and carries that color through judging and market presentation.
• The Spring Cup turns submitted flowers into stock for a three-wave post-show market with visible demand ranges, price risk, save-stable buyer variation, and bounded unsold loss.
• Every market price choice resolves into a held sale scene with visible stock movement, wave revenue, and an explicit next-wave action instead of instantly replacing the screen.
• After the flower market, a saved lucky wheel grants one free draw and at most two coin-or-common-flower draws. Visible odds include resources, a dripper, one-order double payout, a jackpot, and a 0.2% borage seed with an 80-draw guarantee. Once the permanent tank makes portable drippers obsolete, that 8% slot becomes a coin-and-compost maintenance box.
• Wheel draws use a large close-up with labeled prizes, then hold a separate reward reveal until the player acknowledges it. Saved outcomes remain authoritative through refreshes.
• Three repeatable event investments provide automatic care, two targeted flower-count boosts, and pre-market publicity. Closing shows the event's net cash result.
• A 420-coin cycling soil feeder appears after the central tank. It automatically spends stored compost when a growing bed drops below 35% nutrients, making compost and persistent soil part of one visible production loop.
• The Cup rests for six normal greenhouse harvests between rewarded entries; event visitors cannot directly farm main-greenhouse rewards.
• Local save in the browser.
• Feature-specific playtest feedback forms record the target, category, app version, viewport, and a small progression summary without collecting email or the full save.

Deferred:

• Seasons and weather.
• Soil texture, humidity, and light placement.
• Crossbreeding and cuttings.
• Additional floral recipes, remedies, fragrances, and rotating orders.
• Employees, payroll, and automated harvest policies.
• Shelves and rotting from mismatched environments.
• Soft-bodied insects.
• Broad public publishing or authenticated cloud saves.
• Full flower-shop operations, loans, rent, and bankruptcy.
• Floral-arrangement grid play.

Next experiment:

• Measure the current management-heavy baseline with reproducible QA states, then build one isolated calendula slice for safe quiet growth. Do not rebalance every plant, add the caretaker, or build the full showcase scene before this comparison exists.

Tiny Beta

• Live game: greenhouse-notes-playtest.pages.dev
• Temporary rollback: greenhouse-notes-playtest.netlify.app
• Hosting: Cloudflare Pages with D1-backed playtest feedback.
• Private source: rubbishbean/greenhouse-notes
• netlify.toml publishes only the prototype folder.
• Players open one public link without an account.
• Each browser and device keeps its own game save in local storage.
• The previous Netlify release remains available for one release cycle as rollback.
• New releases submit feedback to /api/feedback; Cloudflare D1 stores the small private-test inbox without requiring player accounts.
• A direct link is discoverable by anyone who receives it. It is low-distribution, not access-controlled.

Deployment ownership, routine release steps, feedback checks, rollback, and maintenance warnings live in Deployment and Maintenance.

Dev Garden Online

The design docs and dev log are also published, separately from the game, for sharing with a trusted collaborator: greenhouse-notes-devgarden.pages.dev. Same low-distribution model as the game — see Deployment and Maintenance for how to redeploy it after editing notes or design docs.