Hearty Harvest by Tobius

Play Hearty Harvest
What is the game?
Hearty Harvest is a relaxing puzzle game about growing and harvesting plants. With a unique take on the typical match-3 style, you'll be harvesting crops till the cows come home. 👩🌾
How is it unique?
You do not score points for simply grouping plants together. Instead, each plant grows every turn and when it is fully grown you score points. However, plants will only grow if they are next to another plant of the same color. More plants of the same color will cause them to grow even faster.

Who made it?
Mike, Ryan, and Trevor! We are a group of friends with no real game development experience that like to do Jams together. This is our second Jam as a group, if you'd like to see what we made for our first jam, check out Moirah's Manor!
What is the target audience?
This game is intended to be a mobile game (Try it out on your phone!) that appeals to people who like puzzle games but want something different than the typical bejeweled or candy crush. It is also a great game for anyone who likes casino games but doesn't want to spend money.
What's next for the game?
We would love to publish this on mobile app stores eventually, but first we need an artist to create us actual assets for the game instead of using the free / generated assets we have now.
As far as features, the biggest missing feature is supporting swiping to swap plants instead of clicking. It is partially working but was more challenging than we thought to get it right.
Lastly, adding more content and features to the game. Like different effects that can happen on the different moon phases, other choices instead of seeds each turn (extra growth, etc), additional levels to play, and more design to make the game feel more polished.
Play Hearty Harvest
Ratings
| Overall | 442th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 455th | 3.295⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 295th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 232th | 3.977⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 217th | 3.591⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 371th | 3.5⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 9🗨️ |
Maybe it's just me, but the tutorial wasn't *super* clear as to what I was supposed to do, but I was still able to complete a few levels so I must have done something right :sweat_smile: I think specific instructions in the tutorial (eg: Swap these two plants) and highlighting the results of my actions (eg: See how that made them grow faster?) would have helped.
The music and sound effects were spot on, though some variation in the sound effects and more of them would have helped. I don't think there was any sound when I actually scored points (or if there was, it didn't scale based on how many points I scored) which made it hard to tell intuitively if I was doing well.
I found the game somewhat confusing though, I wasn't ever really sure where the purchased seeds would end up going.
Overall I really enjoyed the game, good job!
Good stuff :8ball: