Idle Garden

I participated in the 2025 ATL Gamedevs Game Jam, a 48 hour game jam for Atlanta-based game developers. Since my birthday was on the 3rd and I wasn't sure how much time I could commit, I participated in this game jam solo, with music support from my friend, RatDrum.

The theme was announced 6pm on the third, and looking up references for the golden ratio led me to making a flower garden game. I've also been interested in making Idle games so I figured this would be a simple way to make that first project. I was pretty confident I could implement all three wild cards so I did just that.

I started off planning the level design, and decided to go with an isometric grid composed of dirt block game objects and a simple green grass background.

Then I planned my game objects: the plot of soil, HUD UI, and Game Manager. I planned for an Audio Manager but didn't have enough time to source the other audio, leaving the background music to the singular Audio Source component and track by RD. I simplified the main menu and folded my typical Menu Manager into the Game Manager for simplicity, reducing the game to only two essential screens. The Overview and Controls panels were a late, quality of life addition. The Game Manager managed the primary game loop, game upgrade conditions, and UI.

For the Soil Game Object, I knew there would be four states (dirt, bud, young, mature) and three flower choices (roses, poppies, and hibiscus). When the player dragged a flower onto a plot, that flower would be planted and would spend an ascending amount of time growing from bud to young to mature. Once mature, the flower would forever add new seeds to the available seeds players could use to grow new flowers. The HUD UI for each flower controlled the available sprites and flower type for the Soil Controller of each soil game object to use.

I haven't quite figured out the drag and drop system with Unity's new UI system, so I ended up using mouse input functions to record the selected flower and assigning it to the next selected plot.

I did all of the art myself! I collected tons of reference photos of the three main flowers and drew the three lifestyle stages of each, along with the soil, the grass, and the seed that would act as the selected UI's placeholder.

Several other quality of life updates were made after the jam, including tuning fixes, camera movement, and new upgrades based on seeds collected or flowers grown.

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with how this game jam turned out. I'm glad I've learned what I have about solo dev, properly scoping, and idle game tuning and mechanics.

View on Github | Play on Itch.io