Mystic Garden
A cozy farming game where players grow magical plants, discover new crops, and cultivate an enchanted garden.
Survival
Shipped
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
4 months
team
WolverineSoft Studio
platform
Unity
The Lowdown
Making magic intuitive through thoughtful game design.
Mystic Garden is a cozy, single-player farming game where players grow magical crops, craft potions, and gradually expand their enchanted garden.
As a Product Designer at WolverineSoft Studio, I worked alongside a multidisciplinary team to shape how players learn, navigate, and progress through the game. My contributions included interface design, tutorial development, quest and achievement systems, character dialogue, and ideation for magical plants and potions.
Role: Product Designer
Focus: UX/UI Design, Product Strategy, Gamification
Tools: Figma, Unity
Discover
I began by familiarizing myself with Mystic Garden's core gameplay loop: planting, growing, harvesting, and crafting.
While these mechanics are familiar to players of farming games, their magical variations introduced additional complexity. Players needed to understand not only how individual actions worked, but also how they connected to one another.
I considered how players would encounter these systems for the first time, where they might need guidance, and which interactions should be left for them to discover independently.
This helped me identify opportunities to improve onboarding, communicate objectives more clearly, and make progression easier to follow.
Define
With a better understanding of the game's systems, I focused my design work around three priorities.
Approachability. Introduce mechanics gradually, allowing players to build confidence through hands-on interactions rather than lengthy instructions.
Clarity. Make quests, objectives, and interface elements easy to understand so players can focus on enjoying the game.
Rewarding Progression. Create meaningful opportunities for discovery and achievement that encourage players to continue experimenting with the game's systems.
These priorities informed my contributions across the interface, tutorials, progression systems, and narrative.
Design
Teaching Through Interaction
One of my main responsibilities was designing the tutorial experience.
Rather than introducing every mechanic at once, I organized the tutorial around a progression of small, achievable tasks. Players begin with familiar actions like tilling soil, planting Tea Seeds, and watering crops before moving into more complex systems such as Growth Potions, harvesting, and crafting new seeds.
Each step builds on something the player has already learned.
My goal was to make learning feel like a natural part of gameplay, allowing players to develop an understanding of the game's systems by interacting with them.
Creating a Clearer Interface
I also contributed to the game's UI, developing wireframes and exploring how information should be presented to players.
With several interconnected gameplay systems, it was important that the interface communicate objectives and available actions without becoming overwhelming.
I focused on organizing information clearly and ensuring that UI elements felt consistent with Mystic Garden's cozy, magical aesthetic.
The challenge was finding a balance between functionality and personality, creating an interface that supported gameplay without distracting from it.
Giving Players a Sense of Direction
Beyond the tutorial, I worked on the game's quest and achievement systems.
Quests provide structure to the experience, giving players objectives to work toward as they explore the garden and unlock new mechanics.
Achievements serve a different purpose: recognizing milestones, rewarding experimentation, and encouraging players to engage with systems they might otherwise overlook.
I explored how these systems could complement one another, providing direction when players need it while leaving room for independent discovery.
Bringing the World to Life
I also contributed to character dialogue, including interactions involving Mistral, the player's black cat mentor.
Dialogue offered an opportunity to introduce gameplay information while reinforcing the game's personality. Rather than separating instructions from the fictional world, I wanted guidance to feel like a natural part of the player's adventure.
Alongside this, I ideated magical plants and potions, exploring their unique properties and potential gameplay effects.
These concepts helped expand the game's possibilities, connecting creative worldbuilding with mechanics that players could discover and experiment with.
Deliver
As Mystic Garden progressed through development, I collaborated with other members of WolverineSoft Studio to bring my contributions into the playable experience.
My work helped shape the game's onboarding flow, interface, progression systems, and narrative interactions.
Together, these elements supported a more connected player journey, from learning the fundamentals of farming to exploring the magical possibilities of the garden.
Working on the game also gave me opportunities to see how individual design ideas translated into actual gameplay and how important it was for different systems to function cohesively.
What I Learned
Mystic Garden taught me that good game UX often comes from making complex systems feel simple.
Designing the tutorial, quests, and interface challenged me to think carefully about when players need guidance and when they should be given the freedom to experiment.
I also gained a greater appreciation for the relationship between creative design and usability. Something as small as a line of dialogue or a new potion effect can influence how players understand and interact with the game.
My biggest takeaway was that meaningful progression isn't just about giving players more things to do. It's about creating an experience where each new discovery builds upon what they've already learned.
