The First Sprout

Plant your seeds, and watch your farm bloom in this cozy grid based puzzle game based on simple simulation mechanics.

The First Sprout is set in a vibrant and colorful world with 2D hand drawn pixel art. 
Each level is unique, and no procedural generation is used.  The farms are all curated by hand, with a planting grid chosen to match the challenges on each level.  Each farm requires a unique planting logic to complete all of the challenges.
The first farm / level is Fairshire Farm: a rural, cozy farm nestled deep in the woods, with your farm house in the middle of a serene pond.  Fairshire has a 9x9 planting grid to help ease you into the life of planting, and propagating your crops to achieve a thriving farm.  This is the first playable level, and also the level featured in the First Sprout Demo!

Hand Crafted Grid Based Challenges:  Each level has a unique grid for planting your seeds, and the goal is simple, produce a certain amount of harvest, with a fixed budget for buying and planting your initial seeds.

Unique Crops:  Each crop has its own set of stats: planting cost, harvest price and rules for survival.  Some plants like having lots of neighbors, others, not so much.   

Mechanics and Automation:  Once your seeds are planted, sit back and watch your farm thrive (or not) using a simulation engine inspired by Conway's Game of Life (google it!).  Plants can propagate and reproduce, create interesting hybrids, or wither and die depending on the eco-system you create when planting the initial seeds!

Progression:  Unlock new crops as you gain resources, and complete the side quests board for each level.  Levels feature some basic side-quests like achieve a certain harvest with only a single crop, as well as more difficult options like harvest 6 hybrids.  There are also some "dark" side-quests, that can only be achieved by failing in spectacular fashion.

Farm Stats!:  Part of the joy of this game is watching a simulation unfold after your curate your seed selection and placement.  The rules of survival and propagation are simple, but the interactions between crops are interesting, and hard to predict. After each run see detailed information on the growth of your sprouts and seedlings, your harvested crops and any hybrids you discovered!

A cozy art style with charming pixel art, and gentle music

Grid based logic puzzles

Highly replayable - each round takes about 10 seconds, so you can iterate and experiment with your crops to discover new efficient and high producing planting patterns

A simple rule set that is easy to understand, but difficult to predict and master

Simple joy in watching a simulation for crop survival and propagation unfold

Level based challenges to complete with simple but difficult objectives

Crops to unlock to expand gameplay.  Crops have interesting hybrid mechanics that can be discovered while your seeds grow and evolve during a simulations.