I Have a Garden

One zucchini plant. 48 real days. Here the game's time is your time. You water it tonight and by tomorrow the soil will be a little drier. It gets light and dark at the same time as it does outside your window. The stems, the leaves and the flowers are drawn by an algorithm that imitates how a plant really grows. No two games give you the same shape, or the same harvest. WHAT YOU'LL DO You check on it, water or feed it if it's time, look for pests and pull the odd weed. For as long as you feel like. HOW THE CYCLE GOES You start by preparing the soil and burying the seed. Until flowering you have to look after it as well as you can, because that stretch decides how many flowers open. When they do, the bees arrive to pollinate them, and if you've kept it up, every one sets fruit. The last stretch takes the most attention: each zucchini has its right moment, and picking it early or leaving it too long costs you points. IMPROVE YOUR PLANT When the cycle ends, you can take the seeds out of the Prime and Overripe zucchini you harvested. There are four qualities: Wild, Adapted, Selected and Heirloom. The better the seed, the more main branches the stem puts out. That raises your chances of getting a chimera zucchini, the hardest thing in the game to pull off. ACHIEVEMENTS There are twenty-two achievements to earn along the way, gardener's ranks among them: when you gather the harvest you get a score and the rank you earned with the plant. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO No account, no email. No in-app purchases, no lives, no paying your way forward. No leaderboard, nobody to beat. And it doesn't message you for the sake of it: a notification arrives when the plant actually needs something, at most one a day, not every evening at seven. It's free and kept going by advertising: a banner at the bottom while you play and, if you feel like supporting it, the odd extra ad that you choose to watch. ALSO You can put a widget on your home screen with the water and feed gauges, without opening the game. A notebook inside that explains every mechanic with real numbers, if you want to know why. A daily graph of water, feed and pests since the day you planted the seed. And a few more surprises. Thank you for playing.