A new game from DoD
One plant. Real time.
Miniature Rose
Micro Tomato
Chilli PepperSow a seed and it grows on the calendar you live on. Cress takes eight days. Basil takes thirty-five. A snake plant takes months. The pot keeps counting while the screen is dark.
Free to download, with optional in-app purchases. Adverts play only when you ask for one.
Grower’s handbook
A booklet you can page through, written from the game itself: sowing, the four needs, light and the lamp, all fifteen species, seeds that remember, pots, rooms and Leaf Points.
Reads right here in your browser. Nothing to download.
The game
Each plant is built in 3D from real photographs of its species, and it stands in a real room, lit for the time of day.
Water it, mist it, feed it, and move it toward the light. Keep it well and it flowers, sets seed and gives you the next generation. Get it wrong and it wilts, and you watch that happen too.
Sweet basil, garden cress, dwarf bamboo, spearmint, miniature rose, pea shoots, micro tomato, dwarf sunflower, nasturtium, French marigold, alpine strawberry, chilli pepper, English lavender, snake plant and monstera. Eight are annuals, which flower, set seed and end their season. Seven are perennials, which keep going.
A seed’s quality comes from how its parent was kept, all its life: its average health, and the lowest it ever fell to. Cross two seeds of the same plant, and the seed that comes back starts a new generation. Breed a line good enough and you can register it under a name of your own.
Every pot keeps its own clock. More pots are bought with Leaf Points or with money, and once bought they are yours for good.
Each day you look in, the plant sits for a picture at noon, and the album plays its life back. The notebook keeps every species you have grown and what it did on your sill. Measure the plant to the millimetre, and compare it with yesterday or last week.
Notifications are off until you turn them on. When they are on, you get two a day at most, none at night, and never one because you have been away. An account is optional: sign in with Google, and the same sill grows on each of your phones. The game itself works offline. Plant mode keeps the screen awake, so an old tablet becomes the pot.
Seven of the fifteen, from the game itself. Days are to full growth, well kept.
Rooms
Every room is a real place, photographed all the way round, with the sill, bench or table your plant stands on made to its real size in front. Turn the camera and the room turns with it.
The Windowsill and the Shelf are yours from the start. Each of the other ten is 300 Leaf Points, kept for good, and you can try it on screen first, with your plant in it at the hour it really is. A room changes the view, never the plant.
A long wooden window board in a white loft, with trees outside.
A dark wood bookshelf in a sitting room in Venice, the tall arched window behind it.
A plywood potting bench under an LED bar, in a nursery shade house full of aloes.
A bistro table at a glass balustrade, over the beach and the Indian Ocean.
Slatted staging in a garden under a glass roof.
A walnut writing desk and a banker’s lamp, in a green-walled study with a leather wing chair.
A tatami platform in a Japanese castle garden.
A scrubbed pine table in a country kitchen.
A wooden kist in a house of glass on the rim of a canyon.
A round mahogany table by the window of a country-house bedroom.
A little table in a quiet café.
A plank table in a pine-clad attic.
LP is Leaf Points, the game’s currency. The room photographs come from Poly Haven, and each is credited in the app.
Free and paid
Every species and the whole life cycle are free. Growing well earns Leaf Points, which buy nursery seed, more pots, a grow lamp and new rooms. Anything bought with money is optional, and is exactly what it says before you buy it.
You earn them by growing plants well, and you can also buy them in packs through Google Play. They buy nursery seed, pots, the grow lamp, a saucer for one pot for 14 days, rooms, and the registration of a line you have bred. Everything they buy can also be earned by growing.
Leaf Points are virtual. They have no value outside the game and cannot be exchanged for money.
The Windowsill and the Shelf are free, and each of the other ten rooms is 300 Leaf Points. The sill holds up to eight pots.
A room, the grow lamp, and a pot bought with points or with money are kept for good: never rented, and not taken away when a subscription ends.
Two optional subscriptions, monthly or yearly, through Google Play. They take the light and the water off your hands.
Neither makes a plant grow faster, and with either the game never offers an advert. When a subscription ends, a lent pot goes dormant: its plant is paused and kept exactly as it was.
7-day free trial. A Google account that has never had a Sill One subscription can try one free for seven days, with the lamp lent rather than given. It becomes a paid subscription on day 8 unless you cancel in Google Play before then.
In the Shop and on the Leaf Points page you can choose to watch a short ad for 3 Leaf Points, up to three times a day. There are no banners, no ads between screens, and nothing over your plant. Subscribers are never offered one.
An ad closed early, or one that fails to play, gives nothing and does not count towards the three. Ads need a connection; the rest of the game does not.
Nothing is sent to Google for ads until you first tap the offer. What Google’s ads software collects after that is in the privacy policy.
Your sill follows you, if you want it toWithout an account your sill lives on your phone, and a backup file, from Settings → Data, moves it. With a free account it follows you to another phone by itself, and you stay signed in until you sign out.
Restoring purchasesGoogle Play can restore subscriptions and the pots bought with money. It cannot restore Leaf Points; those come back with your account, or with a backup.
PricesThe price is the one Google Play shows before you buy, in your own currency.
Watch
A short preview made from screens of the current build: the sill, a Dwarf Sunflower in bloom, the seed pouch and the album. The screens below follow that one sunflower.
Screens
Screens from the game.
Help
Write to the DoD team. Tell us your phone and what you saw, and send a backup file if the question is about your sill.
support@daveonduty.co.uk
