Ssak · 싹

Raise one flower from seed to bloom — on the real clock, tended gently, six to collect.

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Status — complete and closed

Ssak was an 18-day experiment: my first game, and my first project built end to end by driving Claude Code on Anthropic's Fable model. It works — six species, seed to bloom, on the real clock, 58 tests green — and it was never submitted to the App Store. I'm not continuing it. The final documentation and asset archive is dated 2026-09-05.

Read the retrospective → — the game I scrapped first and why, where the agent workflow broke (with commits), and what I'd do differently.

Ssak (싹, "sprout") is a calm, quiet iOS game. You keep one plant on your windowsill and raise it at the speed of a real plant — no timers to beat, nothing to spend. Water a little, come back tomorrow, watch it grow.

How it plays

• On the real clock. Your flower grows on its own compressed timeline — about a real day per plant-week — and only while it's healthy. Patience is the mechanic.
• One at a time. No sprawling garden to manage: one flower, your full attention, seed to bloom.
• Forgiving by design. Droop and gentle nudges, never punishment — no permadeath, and your shelf of past blooms is never lost.

_{A first run, start to finish — pick a seed, plant it, water it once, open the 압화집 shelf.
Recorded on the iOS 26.5 simulator.}

Final screens

All reference images and their provenance.

Collect six

Marigold · Nasturtium · Cosmos · Zinnia · Sunflower · Morning glory — press each bloom to your shelf.

Run it

You'll need macOS with Xcode 26 and XcodeGen. The final UI uses hanji paper and ink, with an iOS 16 deployment target. The README hero is a headless render of this final UI; the walkthrough is a simulator recording.

brew install xcodegen     # once
xcodegen generate         # from the repo root → Ssak.xcodeproj
open Ssak.xcodeproj        # pick a Simulator ▸ Run

Ssak.xcodeproj is generated from project.yml and isn't committed — re-run xcodegen generate whenever the package set changes.

Built with

100% Swift/SwiftUI · no backend · no third-party dependencies · hand-authored static vector art. The game is three SwiftPM packages:

• SsakCore — pure, time-injected game logic (growth, moisture, streaks, persistence), fully unit-tested.
• SsakArt — every flower hand-drawn in SwiftUI Paths, authored through a headless render-to-PNG loop; no runtime art engine.
• SsakApp — the screens over a single GardenModel reducer.

No sound, no haptics — calm is the whole point (ADR-0001).

Docs

• Final archive record — docs/FINAL_ARCHIVE.md
• Project handoff — docs/PROJECT_HANDOFF.md
• Decision ledger — docs/DECISIONS.md
• Closed roadmap — docs/ROADMAP.md
• Retrospective — RETROSPECTIVE.md · Korean archival draft
• Design spec — docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-19-ssak-design.md
• UI redesign — round 1 · round 2 · final hanji design
• Domain glossary — CONTEXT.md
• Decision records — docs/adr/

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License

Copyright (c) 2026 Michael Ju. All rights reserved. No license is granted for use, copying, modification, or distribution of this code as of 2026-07-30. This repository is public for portfolio review purposes only.