Bonsai Garden

Bonsai Garden is a gamified tree-growing simulation where you tend to miniature trees, earn points, and watch them grow over time. Making the trees look convincingly real — with authentic branching patterns, trunk shapes, and species-specific characteristics — turned out to be a fascinating design challenge.

I put a lot of thought into how to guide the AI effectively on research for each species. Rather than asking broad questions, I gave specific direction on what botanical factors mattered most: branching angles, bark texture variation, seasonal foliage. This focus produced much richer species parameters than open-ended prompting would have.

One of my favourite moments was the watering can cursor attempt. The first pass produced two entirely dysfunctional-looking cans — a tiny one for the cursor and a random large one stuck in the corner, with no water droplets anywhere in sight. I've kept those early screenshots as a reminder that when an initial request is unclear, the AI will sometimes implement something entirely different rather than ask for clarification.

This project also gave me my first real hands-on experience with Claude hooks and the remote control feature, which opened up exciting new possibilities for agent-driven development workflows.