Marginalia: A Desktop Garden

Your desktop is the terrain

Marginalia is a transparent, always-on-top idle game that lives on one monitor of your choosing. It reads where your windows are and grows a garden in the space around them: on window top edges, in the gaps, on floating islands of soil. A small crew of astronaut-suited animals tends enormous alien plants, hauls the harvest back to a landed ship, and turns it into money over time. You are their foreman. You set policy, buy upgrades, and watch.

Rearrange your windows and the terrain changes shape. Plants fade gracefully to new homes. Nothing breaks, nothing dies, and no one is ever in danger.

How it plays

• Everything obeys the cursor. The art fades out of your way as the mouse approaches. Rest the cursor on the ship or a building for a moment and it solidifies and becomes clickable. Motion means "I'm working"; stillness means "I'm looking at you."
  
• One mechanism, many expressions. Six plant species, each harvested differently: a flytrap shrunk with a reversal ray, glowing fruit picked from a spire, sap tapped, fronds clipped, a corkscrew vine sawn turn by turn, petals gathered from a moon poppy.
  
• A crew, not a swarm. Start with one worker; hire up to five. Rabbit, frog, axolotl, owl, ram. Rename them, dress them in hats and neckwear and suit colors, and set the policies they follow.
  
• Ten buildings dropped from orbit, from the Briefing Post to the Quartermaster, each opening a stat to raise. Workers unwind at them between hauls.
  
• The Foreman's Log. Thirty entries, delivered slowly, by whoever happens to come in from the field. It begins as a resource mission. It does not end as one.
  
• Three sprite sets and a day-night palette, so the garden can match the desk it sits on.

What it is not

There is no danger and no failure state. There is no offline progress: the only currency is time the game is actually on your screen, and closing it means nothing accrues. It never steals focus, never opens a window over your work, and never interrupts. It throttles itself on battery and while a fullscreen application covers the screen. It is meant to be left running beside your real work for hours, and to be pleasant company the whole time.

Privacy

Marginalia needs to know where your windows are. A small bundled helper reads the on-screen rectangles of visible windows, their front-to-back order, and your monitor layout. It never reads window titles, window contents, keystrokes, or files. The game never goes online: it makes no network connections of any kind.