Lily’s Garden
Tactile Games
Developer
Tactile Games
Publisher
Genre
puzzle
Platform
mobile
Status
live
Role
Level Designer, QA
Lily’s Garden is a narrative-driven match‑3 blast puzzle game with hundreds of flower-themed levels, each with limited moves and objectives like collecting flowers, clearing obstacles, and earning stars. These are used to renovate garden areas, like fountains and orchards, bringing meaningful progression and player choice through decoration.
The central storyline follows Lily inheriting an overgrown estate under the condition of restoring it in 30 days, revealing a multi-layered narrative filled with plot twists and quirky characters.
The game got attention due to its controversial ad campaigns, including social media profiles of the main character and animated videos showing side stories and alternative storylines. The generated media attention resulted in the game being covered by the YouTube channel “The Game Theorists” and an article on the internet pop-culture website “Know Your Meme”.
Its free-to-play and contains in-app purchases and occasional timer gates to balance the players’ progress through the story. Events, hidden areas, daily challenges, and social features like in-game “families” and chat enhance retention and community building.
I joined the project while completing my thesis, starting as a QA tester with a focus on verifying functionality and balancing of new features and content, and performing regression testing. This led me to take the initiative to help establish the test automation pipeline, writing the initial automation scripts and laying the foundation for more efficient testing processes.
Later, I transitioned into a level design role, where my main focus on Lily’s Garden was the creation of engaging, balanced levels, new blockers, and contributing to event content.
During this time, I also took part in SQL workshops, which allowed me to work directly with live player data. This experience enabled me to fine-tune level difficulty and progression using real player behavior and to support the team in detecting and verifying bugs through data analysis.
