Thanks for playing! I’m not sure why you think that, “x” is indeed for a miss and “v” for a hit (their red and green colors also reinforces that). There is a winnning animation, however you may not have gotten it because of an issue documented on the itch page (the plant looks the same as the goal plant but under the hood their ingredients don’t match, so technically you haven’t won – you need to follow the hints to get the right recipe and win). Right now the game is more about figuring out the right combination of ingredients, rather than to get a perfect visual match. I will be fixing that next releases.
As for the water amount, it does have different effects for each phase! In phase 1 it affects the number of sub-branches, and on phase 2 affects the number of fruits/leaves. The visual part of the plants is pretty buggy though, which explains all the weird discrepancies, I’m currently in the process of rewriting that part entirely – hope you’ll check out the final version c: