Playtest 01

Date: 2026-07-30

Tester context: first external tester, with real gardening experience.

Feedback

• The opening required too many clicks and felt hectic.
• More planting space felt necessary.
• Growth needed visible stages, a rewarding final flower, and a decline process.
• Visitors would benefit from visible images and motion.
• One watering action did not add enough water.
• Seeing aphids without an immediate treatment action felt especially wrong.

Interpretation

Early active play can teach the loop and create anticipation, but repeated corrective clicks are not meaningful decisions. Planting, harvest timing, stocking, and sales can remain manual early on. A single care action should resolve the visible problem, and expansion should increase the demand for automation rather than merely multiplying chores.

Changes From This Test

• Manual water and drainage now move the selected plant to the midpoint of its own comfort range.
• Simple waterers also resolve a dry pot to a comfortable level in one trigger.
• Aphids can be rinsed off immediately for one observation note.
• The garden can expand from four to six positions for 96 coins, then to eight for 240 coins.
• CSS placeholders now represent seed, seedling, mature growth, bud, bloom, and decline.
• Visitor chips now include small animated placeholder marks.

Deferred

• Final plant illustrations and species-specific bloom art.
• Visitor illustrations and bespoke animation.
• Batch care controls.
• Stronger automation progression for six- and eight-position gardens.
• Balance testing for expansion prices and the moment maintenance becomes tiring.

Follow-up

The six-position garden amplified maintenance before offering enough relief. A permanent central tank now appears immediately after the first expansion. It costs 160 coins and automatically returns every dry pot to that species' comfortable water midpoint.

Wildberry discovery also felt implausibly slow. Sparrow now has a slightly higher base chance to carry wildberry seed, each failed rare attempt creates one visible clue, and the eighth clue guarantees the seed. The surprise can still happen early, but progress can no longer remain invisible forever.

Repeated one-second UI rendering could replace an action button between pointer-down and pointer-up, making a visibly large target still feel unreliable. Interactive panels now defer rendering while a press is in progress and apply the pending update after the click resolves. Buttons also have a clear pressed state, stable action-row height, and visible keyboard focus.

The existing one-seed-to-many-flowers rule was numerically active but visually understated. Blooming placeholders now render the actual number of flowers produced, and the pot card repeats that quantity as compact flower marks beside the exact harvest count.