The start screen of the game
An expansive list of crops to choose from
Garden stats - plants, watering streak, and more!
A fresh garden - no plants here
Our crop selection screen
Our quick tips popup.
Crop data - all in one page.
Full farm with crops that need watering.

Inspiration

We wanted to create a project which could help more people take initiative to grow their garden efficiently and sustainably by gamifying the experience of growing your own garden. PocketGarden is our answer to this issue: it is a farming simulator, educational tool, and gardening tracker - all bundled into an adorable gaming experience. Our hope was that by gamifying the experience of gardening, we would provide an incentive for people to grow towards a more sustainable future.

What it does

PocketGarden incentivizes users to maintain and water their garden in real life by making it into a game! Users maintain a watering streak and grow crops within their virtual garden. The app presents information about the crops you grow alongside in-game data for watering streaks and frequency, wrapped into a cute gamified bundle. Tips of the day and crucial plant data are displayed upon startup for a more educational experience.

How we built it

PocketGarden was built entirely in Godot, and it stores data in JSON for plant management and data. Furthermore, game progress is saved upon closing, so progress being lost is never an issue. The plant data and farming tips were taken from various online plant databases.

Challenges

Saving game data locally was definitely a challenge; it was difficult learning how to serialize everything into a JSON file, as well as implementing it bug-free. There were also frequent merge conflicts using Godot, as it wasn’t as simple to separate each member’s work as we thought. Even when we finished the game, exporting to mobile presented another challenge, as signing the app for Apple devices required a $100 Developer account, and there were issues with Godot signing the exported Android app as well.

What’s Next?

In the future, we plan on implementing a more featureful experience - more crops, more crop information, and an improved UI/UX. We would love to add more reward for users’ faithful farming, increasing the enjoyment while using the app and better incentivising personal farming. We would provide more plants, and increase the information the user could attain from each plant.