This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam
What I Built
What if you couldn't place a single flower — only teach the garden a rule,
and watch it grow itself?
That's Alan's Garden. The flowers aren't plants. They're tiny programs. You
don't paint the picture; you write the law of nature that paints it for you — then
press Sunrise and hold your breath while the bed blooms, cell by cell, into
(hopefully) the exact shape you were aiming for. One cell too many and it spills.
One too few and there's a gap. Get it exactly right and the whole garden bursts
into bloom.
Here's the twist that makes it a tribute. Everyone knows Turing for codebreaking
and the Turing machine. Almost nobody knows that in the last years of his life he
became obsessed with a different riddle: why does a leopard have spots? His 1952
paper on morphogenesis showed that the patterns all over nature aren't drawn
by anyone — they self-organize from two competing rules, one that says "grow"
and one that says "not here." Spots, stripes, spirals: emergent, from almost
nothing.
Alan's Garden is that idea you can hold in your hands. It felt right for a
solstice — the longest day, a garden at full bloom, order rising out of a
single seed. And the game's tagline is really just Turing's question in disguise:
If flowers could think, how would they talk to each other?
So I let you find out.
Video Demo
Two real solves, subtitled. The fun part is Level 5: I don't touch a single
button — I just tell the flowers what I want in plain English, and watch them
obey. Then Level 9 shows the deeper "clustering" rule, hand-tuned to fill a
frame without a single petal spilling over the edge.
Code
thehwang
/
alans-garden
If flowers could think, how would they talk? A morphogenesis puzzle game honoring Alan Turing — June Solstice Game Jam 2026.
Alan's Garden
If flowers could think, how would they talk to each other?
A puzzle game where flowers aren't plants — they're tiny programs. You give each flower a growth rule (which directions it spreads, who it avoids, who it needs how much support it requires), press Sunrise, and watch a pattern bloom across the bed. Win by growing the garden into the target shape exactly — no spilling no gaps.
A tribute to Alan Turing built for the June Solstice Game Jam 2026.
Level 5 solved: plant B floods the whole bed but keeps a plus-shaped gap around the static seed A — a discrete Turing pattern, grown from one rule.
The Turing tribute
Most people know Turing for codebreaking and the Turing machine. Fewer know that late in his life he was fascinated by morphogenesis — how a chemical reaction-diffusion system can spontaneously produce the…
It runs in three lines:
git clone https://github.com/thehwang/alans-garden
cd alans-garden/prototype
swift run GardenApp # macOS GUI (SpriteKit) — or `swift test` to see every level solved
How I Built It
I built the brain before the body. GardenCore is a tiny deterministic
cellular automaton — grow one step, run the frames, compare to the target — with
zero UI and a test suite that proves every level is winnable and that nonsense
rules correctly fail. Because growth is monotonic, the exact match (when it
exists) happens at one single magic moment. That's the whole puzzle: find the rule
whose bloom lands on that moment.
A few decisions I'm fond of:
- Two verbs, infinite gardens. Every rule is just directions + Turing's pair: activation ("only grow next to X") and inhibition ("avoid X"), plus clustering ("only grow where you're well-supported"). From those, borders, spots, and clean splits all emerge.
- Levels that author themselves. Rather than hand-draw targets (and risk an impossible puzzle), each level grows its own target from the intended rule — so it's guaranteed solvable, and the sunlight budget is computed, not guessed.
- A trailer that actually plays the game. A Hammerspoon script drives real clicks and types real sentences, with subtitles timed to the bloom — no fake screen-recording magic.
Prize Category
Best Ode to Alan Turing. This isn't Turing as a logo on a menu screen — the
mechanics are his science. Flowers are cellular-automaton programs; the
activator/inhibitor pair driving every level is the discrete form of his
reaction-diffusion model; and "you write the rule, the pattern grows itself" is
literally morphogenesis. It's also a soft tribute to the man: a hopeful,
generative garden grown from his most overlooked, most beautiful idea.
Best Google AI Usage. Remember the tagline — if flowers could think, how
would they talk? I made that a real feature with the Gemini API. Type a wish
like "flood the bed with B but keep a gap around A", hit Ask Gemini, and it
translates your sentence into the game's exact rule grammar using
responseSchema-constrained structured JSON — then the toggles light up and
the garden grows it.
Why it's more than a gimmick: it's the fantasy of the game made literal (you
genuinely talk to your flowers), it's safe by design (Gemini only proposes
rules; the deterministic engine still judges win/lose, so a hallucination can
never break a puzzle), and it's optional (no API key → the box politely bows
out and the game plays exactly the same). Prompts were prototyped in Google AI
Studio.
Built in Swift for the June Solstice Game Jam. Music: "Gymnopédie No. 1" by Kevin
MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0.
Code: MIT. Thanks for reading — go grow something. 🌱
