Heirbloom

A garden game for phones

Every flower is the only one of its kind.

Plant a seed, come back when it opens, and cross the flowers you like. Each one carries real genes, two copies of each, so a seed can bloom in a way neither parent showed.

The whole garden in bloom on a summer afternoon, seen from above: terraced beds of daisies, tulips, roses, lilies, poppies, peonies and dahlias inside a low stone wall, with the level, coins and seed bag along the edges of the screen.
My garden on a summer afternoonPl. I

A note from the gardener

Why I'm making it

I'm Tyson, and I'm making Heirbloom on my own. I wanted a garden game where the flowers work the way real ones do: every flower holds two copies of each gene, one from each parent, and the stronger copy is the one you see.

There are about twenty genes and over a dozen species, from daisies that open while you make a cup of tea to a queen of the night that takes days. Colour comes from pigment genes and two on-off switches. Patterns rank from strong to weak, size blends, and doubled petals come one copy at a time.

Nothing in the garden wilts or dies. Watering speeds a plant along, and if you forget, it still opens. Every new kind you grow gets a page in your Florilegium, the painted book of flowers botanists used to keep. Fill yours, page by page.

The game is in testing on Android now. I'll put it in the stores when it's ready.

Tyson, t-sqrd

The loop

  1. Plant a seed
  2. let it grow
  3. see what opens
  4. keep, sell or cross it

Each round asks one question: what will this cross make? Nothing hurries you: there are no timers to beat and no streaks to keep, and the garden waits for you between visits.

The genes

How the flowers work

The rules are real Mendelian genetics, so I've written them down. Nothing here is a spoiler: the rarest flowers stay off this site.