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Vision
selfgrow is an idle garden that never stops growing — a small patch of earth that keeps growing while you are away, and that you can see grow. Every number in the game is something living in the garden: as the numbers rise, the garden visibly fills, spreads and changes. It runs entirely in the browser: no accounts, no servers, no ads, no energy bars, nothing that asks to be paid for. This is the game's unchanging core; everything else may evolve around it.
You start with bare soil and a single seed. Tending it earns what you need to plant more, and that grows into a garden whose parts feed each other — plants, soil, water, pollinators, seasons — and then into new beds, new kinds of growing things and places beyond the first fence that you could not see at the start. Time counts whether or not anyone is watching: coming back after an hour, a day or a month should always be rewarded with a garden that has visibly grown, a clear account of what happened while you were gone, and at least one new thing to try.
What grows here, what the garden looks like within its pixel-art style, and what "further" means are not decided on this page. That is the work, and it belongs to whoever does it. Once a look is chosen, it is kept: new things belong to the same garden.
- The garden is the numbers — every quantity the game tracks has a visible form in the garden, and every change in it shows: more of something means more of it on screen, a new resource means something new growing, a bigger number means a bigger, fuller, older garden. The picture is never decoration beside the state; it is the state, drawn. A visitor who never reads a number should still be able to tell the garden is thriving, and roughly how much.
- Readable at a glance, too — the same state is also there as short labels and values beside the garden, so nothing is only a picture and a display can never disagree with the state behind it. Labels and numbers, not prose: the player learns how the garden works by tending it, not by reading about it, and the page never explains itself in paragraphs. What only a screen reader or an agent needs can be there without being shown.
- One screen, not a long page — the garden, its numbers and the actions that matter right now fit on one screen without scrolling, on a phone as on a desktop. Less scrolling is better: something new earns its place by replacing, folding away or moving behind a tab, never by pushing the garden down the page.
- Always a next goal — at any moment the player can see something they are working towards, and roughly how far away it is: the next plant, the next bed, the next change in the garden.
- It kept growing while you were away — offline time is real growth, never capped to punish absence, and the return is shown as well as told: the garden has visibly changed, with a plain summary of what grew, what was found and what opened up.
- Something new on every visit — a new plant, a bloom, a visitor, an event or a decision. A return that only shows bigger numbers is a missed return.
- Systems that touch each other — a new system earns its place by changing how an existing one is played: what one plant gives, another needs. One mechanic that interacts is worth more than three that sit side by side.
- Endless by design — growth never hits a wall: when one layer flattens out, a deeper one (a new season, a new bed, a replanting for a lasting bonus) makes the old progress matter again, and the garden keeps finding room to grow.
- Time can be rehearsed, never cheated — a separate sandbox garden, kept apart from any real save, lets time be fast-forwarded so an hour, a day or a month away can be seen in seconds. Nothing done in the sandbox ever reaches a real save.
- Fair — no dead ends, no lottery odds you cannot influence, no progress that can be lost by accident. Nothing in the garden dies for good because you were away. Saves are durable and portable.
- Pixel art, all the way through — the garden looks like it belongs on a cartridge: a small fixed palette, crisp unsmoothed sprites and tiles, and simple frame-by-frame animation — leaves that sway, buds that open, bees that drift. The style is the interface itself, not a skin over a modern app: panels, buttons and text share the garden's palette and pixels. Type is pixel type chosen to read comfortably, not only to look the part: titles in Silkscreen, everything else in Pixelify Sans. The garden may be drawn on a canvas, but only beside the page elements that carry the game's state, never instead of them.
- Calm — the garden is a pleasant place to look at and come back to. It rewards attention without demanding it: no nagging, no countdowns that punish, no clutter crowding out the plants. Rewarding attention means noticing it, though: a garden you tended is not the same as one you left alone, so what you plant, tend and save for leaves a mark that idling alone cannot make, and a visit in which nothing you did changed anything is a visit the garden did not really have.
- Effortless — fast to load, light on the device, and correct after any length of absence, however large the garden has grown.
It starts with one seed, one action and one number, and grows outward from there — in the numbers and on screen at the same time. Depth comes from relationships — one part of the garden's output becoming another's input, a choice now shaping what can grow later — not from a longer list of things to click.
Specific features and their status live on the project board and in the changelog, not here. This page is the north star.