Send Flowers

Send Flowers asks you to build your program on the timeline, let it grow, and watch a small garden appear through simple rules, colors, branches, messages, and repetition.
There is no score and no perfect solution. The goal is simply to create something you like and then, send it to others, the other one.

This game was made in 24h as part of the NFTS Game Poems Jam where the theme is The Other one.

Create flowers, send them

The game screen is divided into two distinct parts. The creator part on the left and the visualizer part on the right.

The creator part has a Timeline, it's your flower garden.
Every instruction changes how the garden grows: plant seeds, grow stems, split branches, change colors, write a message, or alter the background.

When the program is finished, press PLAY and watch your garden grow. Isn't beautiful? If you think like me, wait the end of the play to be able to click on the SHARE button. The game creates a unique link containing your entire timeline. Send that link to someone, and they will receive exactly the flower program you created.

How to Play

Drag a tool from the left side and drop it into a slot on the timeline.
The instructions are executed from top to bottom. You can move tools around, edit their parameters, or remove them.
It's not very visible but the timeline can be scrolled, so your flower can contain more instructions than the ones currently visible.

When you edit the timeline, use the controller at the bottom to test your creation:

• RESET returns the garden to its initial state without deleting your timeline.
• STEP executes the next instruction.
• PLAY restarts the program and plays the whole flower from the beginning.

Once PLAY reaches the end of your program, the SHARE button appears at the bottom of the garden. Use it! The shared link contains your creation and allows another person to open the same timeline and grow the flower themselves.

Tools

• WAIT: Grow every active stem and continue developing existing flowers.
• MESSAGE: Display a short message inside the garden.
• PLANT: Plant a new seed.
• HEART: Create a flower at the end of a growing branch.
• COLOR: Change the color used by the next flowers. A random option is also available.
• REPEAT: Repeat a number of previous instructions several times.The most interesting tool, with it, create numerous loops and grow a bigger garden.
• BRANCH: Split a growing stem into two new branches.
• BACK: Change the background color of the garden, with several colors or a random option

First flower

Put on the timeline from top to bottom these tools:

• PLANT
• WAIT
• REPEAT (LAST 1  STEPS 4 TIMES)
• HEART
• WAIT
• WAIT
• MESSAGE (For you...)
• BACK (orange)

And press PLAY. At the end of the animation, you will have a beautiful little flower. As I created this timeline and push the button SHARE, it can now  be recreated directly on your side with this link that will recreate all the timeline. 

Warning: By clicking on the link, you will be move on an itch page where this description text is not showing.

Origin Story

Last Sunday, the 6th September 2026, it was the first time that I've heard of game poems.
I did play at Passage from Jason Rohrer back in time in 2008, but I didn't know that it kick start a whole genre.

After discovering this, I explored everything available in the genre via this curation page and spent a very enjoyable day, by the end of which I wanted to create my own game.

At first, I wanted to literally recreate one of my favorite poems, Demain dès l'aube from Victor Hugo. But thinking of it, it was tricky to do it, a video game as a genre can be keep the essence of this poem but do it by themselves.

Then, few weeks ago, I played at the excellent game U.V.S. Nirmana from Coincidence. It's a engineering puzzle game, a genre I really love. My mind was made up. the flowers of Victor Hugo crossed the puzzle of Coicidence, I had to create a automatism game about flowers.

To finish, I do not know what I created. Is it a game, a simulation, a machine, you be the judge. For me, I think that more of a game poems, I created an engine to write game poems. I really enjoyed spending the last 24 hours developing it. I hope you will like what your creation. Do not hesitate to share them in comments, I will look at them.

Best,
-Joss

The game has been made with the game engine Phaser. All the code is open-sourced and you can read the code directly on the gitlab page. I also used the elegant pixelated font named Monogram by datagoblin.