Bloom

What you actually do

You drag a finger and the little spirit follows it. That is the whole control scheme. There is no attack button, because the plants attack on their own, and your only job is to be standing somewhere sensible when they do.

Pests come in waves and get worse. Killing them drops sunlight, sunlight levels you up, and every level offers a choice of three seeds. By the end of five minutes you are surrounded by an auto-firing garden that clears the screen faster than you can see it happen, and then the run ends and you do it again slightly stronger.

It is the survivor-like loop, which is not my invention, wrapped in something warm rather than something grim. Nothing in it is trying to stress you out.

A run, in five pictures

What is in it

Part	What it does
Plants	Six of them, each levelling one to five. Max one out, pair it with the right passive, and the two fuse into an evolution that is substantially stronger than either.
Pests	Five kinds, from weeds that shamble to snails that soak damage, introduced at different points so the shape of the fight keeps changing.
The Blight Moth	A mini boss that descends every 75 seconds with its own health bar. Beat it and you get health, sunlight and bonus Seeds.
Garden Shed	Six permanent upgrades bought with Seeds earned across runs. This is what makes run twenty different from run one.
Spirits	Three characters, each starting with a different plant and a different balance of speed and health.
Daily Garden	One seeded run a day, identical for everybody who plays it, with a streak and a result card you can share.

No ads, and no way to serve them

Bloom was built to be ad supported. The advertising worked, the ad units were live, and I took the whole thing out before release.

A cozy game is somewhere you put your attention down for five minutes. Interrupting that to sell you something, or quietly recording what you do so somebody can sell you something later, is at odds with the only thing the game is for. So the ads came out. Then the analytics came out. Then, once nothing in the app needed the network, the internet permission came out too, because there was no longer an honest reason to ask for it.

That last step is the one that matters. Bloom does not hold the INTERNET permission, which means Android will not give it a network connection even if something in it tried to open one. It is not a promise about what I do with your data. It is a promise that there is no mechanism by which I could get any.

Three ways to check that, none of which involve trusting me

1. Look at the permissions on the Play listing. It will say no permissions required.
2. Read the Data safety section on the same page. It will say Bloom collects and shares nothing.
3. Turn on aeroplane mode and play. It works exactly the same, permanently, because nothing was ever waiting on a server.

The full detail is in the Bloom privacy policy, which is short, because there is not much to describe.

What it costs

Nothing, and there is no second half to that sentence. No in-app purchases, no subscription, no cosmetic shop, no energy timer that a payment would remove. The game is complete as downloaded.

It costs me nothing to run either. There is no server, no database and no account system, so there is no bill that would eventually need somebody to pay it. That is the reason I can say free and mean it for years rather than until the hosting gets expensive.

Where it actually is

Finished and verified. The game is content complete, it has been played end to end, and the build that will ship is the build I am testing.

What is left is Google's queue rather than mine. A new developer account cannot publish straight to production: it has to run a closed test with twelve testers using the app for fourteen continuous days first, and then wait for review. That is wall clock time, not a queue I can jump by being ready sooner.

So there is no date here yet. When there is a Play listing this page will have the link at the top of it.

If you want to be one of the twelve

I need twelve people with Android phones willing to actually play it for a fortnight. Email hello@khanjankavani.com with the Gmail address your phone's Play Store is signed into.

You get the game, free and permanently, before it is public. I get somebody who is not me finding the parts that are annoying while they are still cheap to change. No forms and no NDA, though I would ask you not to uninstall it mid test, because Google counts testers continuously and dropping below twelve restarts the fortnight from zero.

The same closed test applies to Life OS, and I am running both at once with the same group. If you are already on that list you do not need to email again.

Common questions

Meanwhile

If you came here wanting something to play right now, the arcade has ten games that load in about a second and need no account. The calculators are free and work the same way, and the writing covers money and tax in plain English.