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Ordinary Idle Garden
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About the game
Ordinary Idle Garden gives you four flower pots, 20 copper coins and a lot of patience. Buy a seed, plant it, and watch it grow through its stages until it is ready to harvest. Selling a ripe plant earns more than the seed cost, and the profit goes into the next, more expensive seed.
The shop starts ordinary enough, with dandelions and pumpkins, and gets stranger as you climb: glowing lanterns, a skeleton and a plant simply called a glitch. Money is counted in copper, silver and gold, a hundred of each making one of the next. The goal is the trophy, which costs 100 gold. A small animation in the corner keeps ticking to show that time, and your garden, keep moving.
Playing it here
Ordinary Idle Garden is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. This one targets XO-CHIP, a modern extension with extra colours, more memory and better sound. It was made for a game jam about tiny phone-style screens, so the whole game lives in an 84 by 48 pixel window in two shades of green. It runs here in the Octo emulator, at the fast speed the author recommends; any slower and the plants would take ages.
Click Play and press any key to leave the title screen. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| any key (title screen) | start |
| Q, W, E, A | choose a pot: open the shop for an empty pot, or sell a ripe plant |
| Q, W, E, A, S, D (shop) | buy dandelion, pumpkin, lantern, skeleton, glitch or the trophy |
| X (shop) | leave the shop without buying |
| 1 (held, victory screen) | play again |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Read the prices first. The shop lists every item with its cost: dandelions are 5 copper, pumpkins 3 silver and 2 copper, lanterns 25 silver, the skeleton 2 gold and 7 silver, the glitch 64 gold and the trophy 100 gold.
A buzz means not yet. Pressing a pot whose plant is still growing just plays an error sound. Wait for the plant to reach its final drawing before selling. The same buzz in the shop means you cannot afford that item.
Keep all four pots busy. Plants only grow in pots that hold something, so replant as soon as you sell. Moving up to pricier seeds early pays off: the slow-growing ones bring in far more per harvest.
Credits and licence
Ordinary Idle Garden was created by Cratmang, who wrote the code and drew the graphics; the routine that draws the screen border is credited in the source to Internet Janitor (John Earnest). It runs here in Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). The author released the game under CC0 1.0 and it is kept in the Chip8 Community Archive, where everything is in the public domain. The licence text is linked from this page.