Botanical "Garden": 7-day game jam
Game jam (Jame Gam #61) · September 2026
Summary
Botanical "Garden" is a browser game I made solo for Jame Gam #61, my first game jam. The theme was botany and the special object was a shovel. The jam had a 7-day limit, but I started a day late, so I had six.
On the surface it's a normal garden game: you buy seeds, sow them, harvest and sell. The quotation marks are there for a reason: it's really a casino in disguise. Every crop you grow can be sold for coins or gambled at the casino for clovers, and clovers are what buys the upgrades that matter. The goal is to afford the Golden Shovel.
What I built
- The full game loop: opening CSGO-style seed loot boxes, sowing crops, watching growth rings fill, then harvesting into a sell-or-gamble decision.
- Two casino games: a coin flip and a full blackjack implementation with card dealing, hitting, standing and bust logic.
- A floating window system where every game, shop and harvest opens as a draggable window. Late runs look like a chaotic desktop.
- A procedural colour palette that re-rolls on prestige, repainting every button, panel and background shader at once. Background colours are randomized with the level/depth of each colour as a randomized setting, so the contrast between layers stays easy to see.
- Five full-screen background shaders (lava lamp, neon grid, casino carpet, bokeh, felt table) and a palette-driven button and card system.
- Randomness everywhere. Sets of sounds and shaders get randomized on start, when opening new windows and when pressing buttons. Even the music volume is randomized on startup. Technically that's not good game design, but it was funny.
- A prestige system that resets the run but carries momentum forward, with escalating walls of "I am not a gambling addict" that get louder each cycle.
- A complete win state: buy the Golden Shovel, every window closes, the garden goes quiet, and a final screen reads the room.
- I focused my time on the mechanics and kept the art and sound design simple because of the time limit. The code was AI-assisted, which I also state on the itch.io page.
Result and feedback
The game ended up in the middle of the pack, which is where I was aiming for my first game jam. I actually expected it to land lower, since it's a fairly niche kind of game and the scope was a bit too big for one person.
The reactions were polarised, both in feedback and in ratings, and a few people gave me really nice feedback.
Why it's interesting to me
The main thing I learned was that scope is a design tool. The game has a clear identity (everything is a gamble), and every system points at that one joke. Getting it finished and submitted was partly about saying no to ideas that didn't serve the bit.
I also enjoyed the tension between the garden's calm loop and the casino's chaos. Making those two things feel like one coherent game in six days was the interesting problem.
Credits
Free art and sound assets from other creators, all credited in the game:
- Coin icons and animation: Caz Wolf
- Fruit icons: SciGho
- Clover icon: AhNinniah
- Music: Tallbeard Studios
- Sound effects: Skywave Studio
- Playtesting: Weakweeb, Gryphe, Linus
Tech
- Unity 6
- C#
- HLSL (shaders for Unity's UI)
- GIMP